


Open Road

by CrossedVagabond



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reader-Insert, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2018-08-07 22:32:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 42,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7732243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrossedVagabond/pseuds/CrossedVagabond
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No matter how hard you tried to stop the war from happening, the world ignored you and came to a crashing halt. Now you are alone surrounded by zombies with nothing but a baseball bat. That is, until a man with a red baseball cap stumbled into your life and refused to leave you behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter I

Your eyes were heavy with sleep and ached when you woke to the dull light filtering through the slotted boards over the window. For a moment you laid beside the now cold fire you had made. If only you could fall asleep and this all would go back to the way it was before. The light grew brighter and bright until you were certain that the creatures would be sluggish from the warmth before sitting up and stretching. Your back had absolutely ached when you first started sleeping on the hard ground, now it protested weakly as you pulled your bag closer towards yourself and reached into it. Shit. You were getting low on supplies, you grumbled as you dumped your items onto the ground. Five granola bars, and a can of soup. You’d survive for a day, max. If you could find a home to board up with a generator you’d be set for life as long as you could get food. For now, you’d eat two of the granola bars…your stomach growled, make that three. You had gotten one of those neat water backpacks, but you were running out of fresh water. It was definitely time for a grocery store run.

After slowly eating the granola bars while staring at the window, you rolled up the sleeping bag. You never zipped it up, it was still summer after all, but if a zombie came after you in the night there was no way you wanted to be stuck in a sleeping bag. During the winter you might get lucky and be safer, but for now…well you’d take safety precautions still.

Hopefully, you could snatch a few lighters while at the store as well, most places had already been looted to bare bones, the essentials taken long ago. You were still hoping you could find some useful shit there. Maybe you could find one of those superstores where they had food, clothing, and other things for you.

You packed everything carefully away in your bag before swinging it onto your back and attaching it securely. Your watch would need batteries soon, but that could wait. Instead, you checked the time and stowed away that thought for another day. Shortly after seven. Good. You press your ear against the door and waited for any signs that a zombie was lurking in the hall, not that it mattered. Sometimes they didn’t move for hours only to jerk their head up as a mouse crawled past. You had watched enough to know their oddities by now.

The door creaked from misuse, and you gripped the baseball bat tighter and raised it with both hands. Nothing came at you right away so you slowly stepped into the hall and looked around again. Sure, when you had searched the floor last night there was nothing, and you had made sure to close the stairway door. For all you knew zombies didn’t know how to use doors, but they could break them down. Thankfully, it looked like the door was still shut tightly and you allowed yourself to let out a breath.

This entire damn thing was more trouble than it was all worth if you were being honest. No. The end of the world didn’t just happen with a war, it came with fucking zombies. Sure, you had read novels about them, played video games with them in it, and watched TV shows and movies centered around a post-apocalyptic world where zombies were the big bad guys…but honestly? This was real life, there should be no zombies, and there shouldn’t have even been the end of the world. For all you knew the rest of the world was gone and you were the last one consciously aware of what was going on. You hadn’t seen a goddamn person since it all began. You stepped out onto the streets. Something that was never shown or mentioned in media was the bodies littering the ground. Most had been cleared away by body crews beforehand, but once the dead began outnumbering those alive? They collectors stopped. There were a few you could see and smell from where you stood.

Most were at the hospitals, piled outside when they began to get too many bodies for the morgue to deal with.

You felt…you used to feel sad when you saw the bodies. You used to vomit and have nightmares about those bodies.

Now, your gaze didn’t even acknowledge the body as you started down the road. You were too busy looking out for the living dead rather than the sleeping dead. You were about a fifteen-minute walk away from the grocery store you had passed a couple days ago. You hadn’t really left the area but that was simply because you were trying to figure out where to go.

You start to quietly hum a song as you walked, swinging the bat idly by your side as your gaze swept over the road. Zombies didn’t always come straight after you; some looked at you and then walked away.

Perhaps they were full?

That was something Zombie media never covered either. They always came after the main character with bloodthirsty intent.

It wasn’t the same in real life.

Only one zombie started shambling after you as you approached the grocery store, but you just kept note on how far it was from you. When it got too close, you turned and swung your bat as hard as you could at its head. The zombie fell over, and you slammed the edge of the bat straight down and shattered the Zombies skull. Another whack and the zombie’s body twitched and went still. You checked it but found nothing useful. Just a wallet with useless money, and a coupon to McDonald's. You tossed the wallet on the zombie’s chest and sighed. The only zombies ever worth searching were those who died after the apocalypse happened, ones with backpacks on. They were usually filled with goodies.

The grocery store had most of its windows still, and you didn’t bother smashing another one and climbed into the broken one. Scraping your knuckle on the way in. You sucked on the cut and decided you should check out the pharmacy section. Nothing would be there, the shelves picked clean but it was worth a look still. Humming again, you took one of the baskets and headed through the store. You needed to be able to drop whatever was in your hand at a moment’s notice if a zombie came after you, and you were not going to drop your water backpack. If it burst everything inside would be soaked.

The pharmacy section had a few bandage boxes and a few painkillers, vitamins galore, and braces. You take the bandages, painkillers, some vitamins (you were not getting scurvy), and took a knee, ankle, and wrist brace. Just in case. You never knew what was going to happen, and if you sprained or hurt your joints you were basically fucked.  You head behind the counter and check to see if anyone had broken into the locked cabinets where the pharmacist would keep the high strength items. There was still a shiny lock. You decided to save breaking into that for last, it would make noise and you didn’t want to draw attention from the dead or living.

You wander throughout the store with your loot, picking through the various abandoned articles of food and ignoring the smell of rotting meat and vegetables. The meat counter was bound to have a few of the undead chowing down on the mouldy beef, and you avoided it like the plague.

A tomahawk slammed into a box of cereal beside you and sent a spray of frootloops raining over you. You dropped your basket and jumped backward nearly fast enough to make you trip over your own feet. There was a surprised noise and you swung your bat blindly in the direction that the weapon came flying from. It cracked loudly against the metal shelves and someone yelped in surprise. You swung the bat back for another aim before registering the person before you. He was wearing a backpack such as yourself, a red baseball cap over sandy hair. His belt had a throwing knife pouch attached, but he was holding his hands out towards you.

Neither of you moved as you assessed each other. You slowly lowered the bat when he didn’t come any closer, and took a step back. He didn’t lower his hands too much but the fear in his eyes faded.

“I’m sorry,” the man apologized once the bat was lowered enough not to be an immediate threat but could be quickly swung still in case of a threat. “I thought you were one of the zombies,” he admitted, then a look of horror spread over his face, “If you had taken another step and I had hesitated a second I would’ve killed you.”

You eyed your basket and then saw he had the same idea, but with a cart instead. He had a lot more food than you did. He saw you glance at his cart and you snapped your eyes back to his. You didn’t know if he was going to become protective of his loot or not. Honestly…he was really the first alive human you had seen thus far. Purely because you didn’t want to get involved in the post-apocalyptic drama, but since running away from where you had been at the start of the bombing…you hadn’t crossed another human being. It was odd, and you hadn’t spoken out loud in so long, you couldn’t find the words at first. Even though he looked like he was awaiting some sort of response.

“Are you alone? Or do you have a group?” he asked, and your eyes snapped up to his. You didn’t see his eyes wandering over the store, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t trying to make sure you were alone. He still was armed, and his weapons were deadlier than yours. If he got to his knives before you could swing, he could slice your throat before your bat even made contact with him.

“Do you have bolt cutters?” you asked instead of answering him. Maybe if you showed him where the good medicine was, he would be more likely to think of you as an ally rather than someone to kill to get their equipment. Even though he apologized for attempting to kill you, that just might be because you had the temporary upper hand and nothing to do with his morals. His face screwed up in confusion before he nodded and slowly reached behind him. You tightened your grip on the bat but he fiddled around a moment and then pulled off a pair of bolt cutters from his bag.

“Just in case I get trapped,” he shrugged his shoulders, “Why?”

“There’s a locked cabinet with high strength medicine in the pharmacy section,” you jerk your chin in the direction, and he slowly nods.

“Let’s fill our bags with some of the things we’ve collected, and then we’ll head over,” he offered, “There are some walkers by the deli section, and they might be slow but I’ve seen them call in a horde in seconds and I might be able to get away from one or two but a horde?”

You nod your head in agreement and allowed him to remove his backpack and head to his cart. You watched him pick through what he had and place more essentials into his bag. He stuffed a box of tampons into his bag, and you concluded that while you didn’t have anyone else. He did. Unless he was transgendered, you weren’t going to assume. He added deodorant and other none necessities after filling the rest with non-perishable’s. You took off your bag and quickly dumped your basket into your bag without care of importance. It all fit in anyways, and you could organize it later in private once you were away from him.

The two of you headed over to the pharmacy and you led him to the cabinet.

“Okay,” he muttered as he placed the cutters around the lock, “Is there any Zombies?”

You shake your head and he inhales before squeezing the two handles together. You kept your eye out for any zombies approaching as he grunted with effort and the cutters and the lock clanged around. There was a tightness in your chest that made you feel like a teenager breaking into your parent’s liquor cabinet, but grew into something more serious as you realized it had gotten quiet besides the noise the man was making. You couldn’t figure out why it made you so nervous, but it did.

With a final grunt, the bolt cutters slid through the metal and he lowered them. You quickly grabbed the lock and quietly slipped it off and placed it gently down on the desk. The man grew still, his head cocked to the side, listening.

“Do you hear that?” he whispered, hand reaching to his belt but not to the throwing knives. His eyes snapped down and you saw a look of brief panic. He forgot his tomahawk.

You open the cabinet and search the bottles for anything that seemed familiar. In the end, you scooped a bunch of the bottles for identification later and dumped them into your bag. The man tore his bag off his shoulders and you put some more into his. Neither of you was okay with staying further.

“Let’s-”

Before he could finish there was the loud shattering of glass before the ear-splitting scream of a zombie seeing its prey. You were over the counter in a second and heading for the front. A hand grabbed your arm, “Not that way!” the man dragged you away from the front just as you saw the horde. At least fifty zombies pouring in through the broken glass, another window broke and more poured into the grocery store. “The back!”

The two of you threw caution to the wind and sounded like elephants storming through the store. As you passed an aisle, he skidded to a stop, nearly ramming into a post, and darted down it. You debated abandoning him, but he appeared a second later with his tomahawk. He gawked seeing you tensely waiting before he glanced behind him. The zombies were slow, and couldn’t run during the day, but their fastest speed was a slow jog. They were following the two of you like a dog that caught the scent of a treat. He pushed you forwards and nudged you again when you didn’t move immediately. You two took off again.

You get to the deli section; zombies lifted their head from their meals but abandoned their curiosity for their current meals. They were opportunistic, and you were running and alert. They would never try to eat a running human if there was a meal in front of them. You just hoped it would divert most of the horde from you to escape. The man shoved into the back room and beckoned for you to follow.

It was nearly pitch black, but he pulled out a flashlight and you threw yourself towards the receiving door chain and yanked. It didn’t budge, and your hands started to shake as you tried to find a switch, a lever, or anything that you could pull to get the chain loose. The man swung the flashlight away briefly and pointed to the actual back door.

“It’s an emergency exit, it’ll set off an alarm!” you blurted angrily, “I need the light.”

“With what power?” he demanded, “Come on, we’ve got a horde after us, it doesn’t matter-”

“There is a generator! We’ve already got a shit ton on our asses, I don’t want anymore!” you snark back, and he grabbed your arm. Flashlight swinging towards the front as zombies pushed open the door. Their groans, moans, and snarls filling the air. You pale and swallow, “Backdoor it is.”

He slammed against it, and the alarms went off instantly. You lunge through just as a zombie reached for you, and the man slammed it closed. “Push the dumpster!”

“I’m not strong enough for that,” you admit, “Come on, just run!”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He leaned against the door as a zombie hit it, and tucked the tomahawk into a loop on his belt. “Are you ready?”

“Across the parking lot, if we cut through that alleyway we can hop a fence and go through the playground. After that, we’ll go slower to avoid drawing attention. They should lose interest after we hop the fence,” you explain, pointing ahead. There was a residential area across the parking lot and a road. He nodded, and then jerked his head.

“You get a head start if they catch up it's better if one of us gets caught then both,” he suggested, and you frowned.

“We just met-”

“Go!” he blurted as another zombie hit the door and it cracked open an inch.

You felt like a piece of shit…but you ran. You heard his feet slamming behind you a second later and the door cracked against the wall as the zombies poured into the parking lot. You looked around and more zombies were approaching the grocery store. Drawn by the alarm and the scream of the horde. You nimbly dodged around a zombie and glanced back briefly to see the man slam into it and send it to the floor and continue on.

Ever since this had happened you had never really been chased by a horde, you always had been able to hide as they stumbled around and slowly left. The terrain changes from asphalt to dirt, and then you threw yourself up and grabbed the top of the fence. The metal cut your palm but you yanked yourself up. The man grabbed your legs and boosted you straight up and you nearly fell right over, but caught yourself last minute and hit the grass with your feet and hands. He followed a second later.

You look back to see the horde just crossing the road, and allowed yourself to take a second to catch your breath.

“I’m Ryan,” the man said, watching the zombies as well. You said your name between your breaths, and he held his hand towards you. You showed him your hand and he cursed. “Shit, let’s find a place to hide out so we can wrap your hand. Sorry, didn’t think the fence would cut you.”

“Wasn’t your fault,” you shrugged before a zombie hit the fence. You jumped back, “Let’s go.”

He quickly seconded it and the two of you moved quickly, but quietly out of the playground and through the residential area.

For now, you’d trust him. As long as he provided useful, at least.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haha so I lied about not posting this until after I get back from my road trip! I'll just have an upload schedule of every Wednesday instead! Also, I have no idea how many chapters this story is going to be, unlike Silver Lining. I have four chapters planned out so far, so we'll see!
> 
> Hope you guys enjoy the first chapter of Open Road.


	2. Chapter II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay?? So I updated this story but it hasn't been updating??? Oh well. I'll double check that this chapter uploads, and the future chapters upload as well. Dang it.

Eventually, you and Ryan found the perfect hideout. A tree house. Ryan went up first, because if it couldn’t hold his weight what was the point? You followed a second later after he gave you the all clear. Your palm stung as you hoisted yourself up the wooden rungs, and into the small room that barely fit the two of you. He was sitting against the wall, backpack abandoned to the side. Exhaustion clear on his face. You collapsed to the wooden floorboards across from him and emptied your bag. He reached into his bag and pulled out some gauze.

“Here, lemme do it,” he offered, gesturing to your hand, “I don’t have anything to clean it, but we should at least keep dirt out.”

You shake your head, grabbing the roll of gauze you had, “Don’t waste your supplies on me,” after all, you didn’t want to be indebted to him. Instead, you handed him the roll of gauze and allowed him to wrap your hand that way. Once it was secured, you found your pair of gloves and pulled them on over top of the bandaging. Then, you proceeded to take stock of what you had gotten and organized them properly into your bag. You still needed to find a running source of water or take the time to boil and cool water for your bag but you still had enough for a couple more days if you drank sparingly. The pills you had gotten took you a bit to decipher, and you abandoned those that you knew were harmless, destroyed what was dangerous for anyone in this situation to take without having the problem they were prescribed for. Others you kept for yourself.

“You were getting a lot,” you idly muttered, trying to find something to talk about. He glanced over at you, previously looking out the window at the sun. It was shortly before noon. Still, plenty of time before the sun would start to set.

“I have a group of survivors,” he shrugged a shoulder, “Normally I have a partner that I go with, but we’re moving camp and I was supposed to make a quick stop…but then I decided to grab more. If I hadn’t stopped for as long as I did, we wouldn’t have met. There is a camp for survivors farther north.”

“Where’d you hear that?” you asked, surprised. When you had seen the first zombies you had checked radio signals and there was nothing but static. Maybe they had gotten lucky? Had he bumped into survivors who had heard it from someone else? You had stopped organizing your bag to watch him.

“Those remaining in the military set it up. They’ll have the gear to protect us,” he explained, and he sounded so hopeful that you stopped yourself from bringing him down. If it wasn’t for the government the war wouldn’t have happened and none of this shit would’ve occurred. You didn’t want to bring that up, and he continued on, “I was conscripted into the military halfway through the war, and I was hospitalized before the bombs were launched. When I came to, the hospital staff were panicking and we were told of the camp.”

You looked up and saw his hopeful eyes fade a bit. The war was getting worse, but instead of calling it off and signing a treaty or anything…they started to conscript anyone fit enough to fight. Many of your friends had been conscripted, many tried to flee but were tried as traitors…it had quickly become apparent that there was no democracy anymore as you had watched your friends shot in front of your city for betraying the country.

Neither of you spoke for a while, ghosts dancing in your heads. After a moment, he sighs and looks at his bag. “You can come with me if you want. I wouldn’t feel right leaving you behind, humanity needs to stick together right now…”

“Why would you trust me so readily?” you asked, “I mean…you did try to kill me, so why should I trust you? I would’ve caved your head in if your hands even went to your throwing knives before you spoke….so why do you trust me?”

He looked surprised when you admitted you would’ve tried to kill him if he appeared to be a threat to you. He cleared his throat, and shrugged his shoulders, “I trust you because when we were running from the zombies you kept looking back to check on me. You stopped running when I went to grab my tomahawk and didn’t move until I did. You didn’t want to leave me when I was holding the door. You might not trust me, but you don’t want me to die horribly by zombies. I trust you because even with all the shit that has happened, I still have faith in humanity.” You stared at him, a bit in awe if you were honest. You couldn’t tell if it was naivety or just a positive outlook on life. Either way, you didn’t feel like you could just shoot him down and tell him that you lost your faith in humanity years ago when the war first started. He gave you a slight smile before it slowly faded. “However, if you dare hurt my friends or betray my trust, I will make you regret it.”

The fact that the threat was so vague scared you a bit.

“How can I not trust you now?” you asked, sarcasm pouring into your words, but you dumped the contents of your bag onto the floor and gestured to his bag. “If we’re going to be travelling together, we might as well divvy up our shit. You’ve got more people? We can hit a few more stores this way.”

You weren’t going to fully trust him, but you would travel with him for now. He shrugged a shoulder before emptying his bag. A few minutes later, your pack was slightly heavier but his looked lighter. He tried to carry more, but you wanted to have a more even split. If he turned against you, you could escape with more things than you had gone into this. Once both bags were zipped back up, you checked the sun. Ryan headed for the ladder and glanced around before easing his feet down. “We’ve got a few hours, we need to get across the river to meet up with my group.”

You had to wait until he was on the ground before heading down yourself, your hand ached but it wasn’t bad. If you could find antibiotics or something to keep the germs from infecting your hand. There wasn’t exactly any sort of doctors you could go to. Ryan adjusted the hat on his head, looking up at the sun. He took a deep breath and huffed it out. Then smiled at you. “Let’s get going then.”

Neither of you wanted to backtrack towards the supermarket, even if Ryan mentioned how it was faster to get back to his group. You didn’t know how long it would take zombie’s to disperse, but it was sure to be longer than a few hours since running away from them. The other route would take the two of you quite out of the way, but you knew exactly what areas to avoid on this side of the area. Going his way could expose you two to the toxic gases if you had to run from another horde. Thankfully, you assumed most of the zombies within a good distance would have already swarmed the grocery store.

At about one the sun’s rays were baking the asphalt and you felt like you were walking through a desert. You grew jealous over Ryan’s hat, which shielded his eyes from a large majority of the sun’s rays, and he had dug out a pair of sunglasses from the depths of his bag and was now sporting them as well. You felt unprotected and hot. You took the tube connected to the water portion of your backpack and took a few sips, trying to sate your thirst and keep hydrated.

A few zombies stumbled out of a building, and you altered the route to head into the back alleys.

When you emerged both of you stopped. You had seen it many times, but it was clear this was his first time. A crashed tactical helicopter. It had been picked clean of anything useful, and even the pilot lying dead in the cockpit had pieces of his uniform missing from looters. Strips of the metal and been peeled away, the only evidence of other humans around. Ryan pressed his lips together tightly.

Neither of you spoke for a moment but then he moved on.

“Where were you?” he asked once the helicopter was far behind and nothing more than a distant memory. You peeled your shirt away from your body for a moment, hoping for some cool air to flow in.

“When?” you asked, glancing up at the sky. A few more hours of walking and then you’d have to start figuring out where to lay low for the night. You didn’t want to be stuck out in the middle of the street once night hit.

“When the bombs dropped,” he clarified, his voice tight. You wondered if that was a common thing survivors talked about, or if it was just seeing the helicopter that reminded him that this Apocalypse wasn’t caused by the zombies, but by humans. You didn’t know if you should even answer, had he been pro-war, was he pro-war? Or was he anti-war?

In the end, it didn’t really matter, the war happened and now you were both walking down a desolate street in the middle of the day when it used to be swarmed with vehicles. “I was shut away in a bunker for ‘treasonous scum’ as the military called us,” you said, trying to keep the bitterness out of your voice. It still seeped through and his eyes snapped to yours. You saw the question in his eyes before he opened his mouth. “I was anti-war. They put up with the protesting at the start of the war, but when it actually came here?” you shook your head, “I’m sure you’ve witnessed the brutality the protestors faced.”

“What was it like?” he asked, genuinely curious, “My group all opposed the war, but none of them were ever imprisoned.”

You were glad, honestly. If he was pro-war, you might have decided to leave him on the road alone. The friends and family you lost were inexcusable and if any of the political leaders were alive and surviving, you’d make sure they would leave this world by your own damn hand.

“It was…like a conversion camp. Constantly bombarded with propaganda, and all this shit…” you trailed off suddenly feeling your chest grow tight even thinking about it. When the lights had gone out in the bunker, and the doors locked you were trapped for hours until the military finally cracked the door and got all of those scum out onto the surface to witness a huge mushroom cloud in the distance. You had run as fast as you could away, and you ran for days until you reached the closest city. “Where were you?” you asked finally, shaking off your memories, and attempting to get your mind to focus on the present.

“I was conscripted,” he admitted after nearly five minutes of silence, “Once the willing participants either died or fled, the military came in and took me and a bunch of my family and friends and gave us weapons and sent us to the front lines. I was lucky to get attacked by acid or else I would’ve still been in the camp that had been sprayed with the toxic chemical that turned people into zombies.”

You nearly stumbled and stared at him intently. You could see a few discolouration marks on his face, but nothing bad. He quickly noticed your attention and laughed weakly. “It’s mostly on my chest and arms, I protected my face when the bomb went off. I was in the hospital still when the real bombs dropped.”

You couldn’t find any words to say, and both of you walked in silence for a while. Both lost in your own thoughts of fresh unburied memories.

The last report of casualties you had heard was up past three billion before you were arrested. You suspected at least another billion or two had died in the nuclear explosions, and then you didn’t even want to guess how many people were now zombies. Ryan…he was lucky to have gotten out of his camp before the chemical warfare started. He would have more of an idea about how the rest of the war went after you had been locked away, but you didn’t want to ask. You already felt like you had invaded his privacy too much.

Even if you knew next to nothing about him.

“Ironic, isn’t it,” you mutter mostly to yourself, “I was going to school to become a pharmacist before this all happened. I was nearly done my schooling.”

He glanced over at you, “How is that ironic?”

“I felt drawn towards medicine, but instead of becoming a surgeon or something like that, I decided to study about the actual compounds of medicine. I know what works for what, and what doesn’t work with other medications. I know what the medicine in our bags is for,” you explained, “I originally wanted to do something completely different but…”

“At least your profession is useful to the apocalypse,” Ryan pointed out, and then laughed, “I worked at an entertainment company as an animator and entertainment slash technology newscaster. If you want me to make a device that will vibrate every minute or so, I’m your guy! You want me to stitch up a wound or figure out which berries are poisonous? Nah, I’d end up dead.”

The corner of your mouth rose in amusement, “No, you’re the person that keeps the rest of us entertained and sane during this. You bring the jokes.”

“Ah, yes. Ryan the Joke Guy.”

You paused, “I think I saw a shirt that said that once.”

He groaned, but before he could elaborate, he stopped in his tracks. A zombie was feasting on a fresh corpse in the middle of the street. More were swarming towards it. He reached towards his tomahawk, but you stopped him and jerked your head to the side. “They won’t attack, but give a wide berth. They’re like…hyenas. They’ll make a kill if they have to but they’d rather go after something already dead then chase something alive.”

With a slow nod, you led him away from the main road. Both of you ignoring the image of flesh tearing and the sickening chewing of a zombie eating a human.


	3. Chapter III

You hadn’t considered how frustrating traveling with someone could be. Both of you had agreed on which way to go at first, but eventually, you must’ve taken a wrong turn or something because you swore you were heading back the way you came. While Ryan was adamant that he was leading you both where you wanted to go. You ended up bickering for a good ten minutes over whether to turn back around and try to find a road that was more familiar to you, or continue on like Ryan wanted to do. Eventually, you threw your bag onto the dirty and dug through it until you found your journal.

At the very back, you had stuffed a map of the city, which is what you pulled out and spread onto the grass. “Okay,” you grumbled, looking around. Then you bent down and studied the map. Ryan crouched down, close enough that his knee brushes your hip, he was clearly half paying attention to the map. Someone had to keep an eye out for the living dead, after all.

“This is where we are,” you jabbed your finger into the map, making it wrinkle a bit. You smoothed it back down and scanned the surrounding areas. “That’s where we need to be by nightfall,” you pointed to the bridge, “There are a few secure spots near it on this side, I’m not sure about the other side, and I’d rather stay somewhere I know tonight rather than end up in the middle of zombie invested apartments while they’re hyped up on their night zoomies.”

“…Night zoomies?” he asked, amusement in his tone.

“Well…they get really fast during the night for some reason. It reminds me of like cats or dogs when they just get really pumped up for no reason and tear around the house?” you wave a hand before he could respond and look at the closest road sign. “If we continue that way,” you dragged your finger over the map, “We’ll just be heading South. We need to go North.”

He was silent for a moment and then pointed to where you had wanted to head, “If we headed that way, we’d be heading the right direction but too far East.”

You squinted slightly then sighed, “Okay, so we were both wrong. This is why we do maps,” you nod and then mapped out a path before telling Ryan. He examined the map before he nodded. Just before you could start folding the map he stopped you with a hand on your forearm.

“What are those red parts?” he asked with a nod. “Do they have more zombies?”

“No…those are areas where you need at the very least a gas mask to enter. It's areas where the toxicant lingers still. You go in there, and you’ll be a zomb,” you finished folding the map and then stretched and checked your watch. “Okay, we have about three hours until the sun starts to set. We should have plenty of time.”

He nodded and looked around while adjusting his baseball cap. As if silently preparing himself for the day ahead. You might not fully trust him…but you were glad you found him and at the same time, you were irritated with his presence. He exuded calm and control, but at the same time, he wasn’t slow to make jokes or ask questions to keep a conversation flowing. While his sense of direction wasn’t the greatest, neither was yours and with the dilapidated buildings, the destroyed street signs, half of the streets no longer resembled what they had been before the war. You couldn’t blame yourselves for getting turned around.

You took the lead, keep the map in hand as you walked.

After a good thirty minutes, you slowed down so you were actually walking beside him and pointed at his weapon of choice. “That’s kind of dumb.”

“Why?” he asked, genuinely curious if a bit offended. You tapped your baseball bat on the ground and the aluminum sent a metal twang ricocheting off the buildings around you.

“You threw it at me, if I had been a zombie and you hit my shoulder, you might not have gotten the axe back,” you pointed out, “If I was aggressive I could’ve taken your weapon and used it against you. Or, your axe could grow dull. Or, you throw it and a zombie appears right beside you!”

He chuckled, “I normally throw one of the knives, and I have a stash back at the camp for the knives. If I’m able to, I circle back to grab them, if not no sense crying over spilled milk. We have some better melee weapons back at the camp that I normally use.”

You smile, but don’t continue the conversation. He almost let it die, but then he brought it back around to the baseball bat. Why you chose it, where’d you get it, all those fun questions. If they had been that interesting to tell, you would’ve regaled him with a longer version if to pass time. Instead, you told him you had bust out of prison and gotten to the nearest city - this one- and picked up the first weapon you could find when the zombies came. You had the baseball bat ever since, and you knew it would eventually crack and therefore be completely useless, but it still worked perfectly fine for what you needed to do.

A few times he dipped towards questions about your life before the apocalypse, but you steered clear from answering. Or you would ask a prying question and divert the conversation but pointing out zombies in the distant and not speaking until they were out of sight. It was too early to open up completely to him, it would be rather stupid of you to do so when at any moment he could just turn around and slam the axe straight between your eyes before you could even blink. You wished you could say you’d be able to tell if he was going to turn on you, but you didn’t.

He told you stories of his crew, sparing location details, of course. Either he caught on that you didn’t want each other to know too much about where you’ve been, or who you were, or he was showing you that he didn’t quite trust you either despite his easy friendship. Perhaps it was better to make people believe they trusted you, so they would let their guard down. It was the easiest way to make sure that you’d see it coming if he did turn on you. The only problem is if you needed to leave, and he truly did trust you then you’d be betraying him.

A fine line to walk on.

He wasn’t bad looking, a bit scruffy from lack of proper shaving tools, and his hair was growing out past his ears, but he seemed to be irritated by that. Every so often he’d reach up and shove a piece of hair that was tickling his neck back under the hat. You didn’t know the full length of his hair, just the occasional strand slipping out of its confines. He was strong, but there were hints of softness in his body that told you that most of his muscles had developed out of necessity rather than regular exercise before the war.

You slid your gaze away before he saw you staring. You could pin him around early thirties easily, he probably was already married, the whole works. As the two of you made idle conversation, you had begun building his backstory from before the war. You were curious about the real thing, but you weren’t about to pry. That would cross the line.

At the exact same time, there was a steady beeping from your watch and Ryan’s. You quickly silenced it and looked at the street sign. “We need to make a decision, get closer to the bridge tonight and risk the night zombs, or find a place nearby to hunker down for the night.”

He bounced on the balls of his feet, glancing every direction until he looked at his watch. “Do you know a place for sure up ahead that we can stay in that’s secure?”

You thought about it for half a second before nodding, “It should be, nowhere is a hundred percent safe,” you reminded him. Another look around and he closed his eyes.

“We need to make as much progress today as possible. We need to be in a secure place before the sun disappears below the horizon,” he warned bending down and making sure his shoelaces were tight and tucked in so he didn’t run the risk of tripping on them. You were glad you had found some running shoes that didn’t have laces on them. No risk there. You copied his previous movement and bounced on the balls of your feet testing your muscles. If an area was dark enough a zombie would run, and they were stronger at night. A darkened alley could be fatal if one of them darted out from the alley and grabbed you before whatever made them slow in the day even affected them.

It would be stupid to run, sprint, or jog further ahead. Every spare breath was vital, so when the two of you started to move it was a brisk walk. Still took energy but it wasn’t as draining. You kept an eye out for possible escape routes, and safe areas you had slept in before, just in case.

Ryan was a step behind you, even if you knew he could outpace you easily if he tried.

The sun setting sent a spike of anxiety through your body, you didn’t want to be out. Normally, you’d be tucked away safe and hidden. Zombies had occasionally attempted to enter a safe house you had stayed in if they saw you enter before sunset. If they didn’t see you enter, they didn’t bother trying to get in. Nothing was worse than finding a hiding spot just to have a zombie slamming against the door all night long letting you get no sleep.

You were trying not to admit it to yourself…but if his group did accept you into it once you met them, you wouldn’t have to bother with sleepless nights due to fear of being alone. If you were part of a group then they could take shifts and you could maybe get a decent few hours sleep. You hadn’t seen your reflection in weeks, not for lack of reflective surfaces, but just not caring to look. You could guess that your eyes were dark circles, mud-caked your skin, and your hair was a greasy mess. Sleep wouldn’t fix your hair or the dirt on your skin. It would make it so you weren’t stumbling through life feeling exhausted and paranoid.

God, you wanted a comfy bed, a warm shower, and your old life back. Your relationships, your family.

Ryan grabbed the back of your shirt and jerked you to a sudden halt. You blinked and focused on the situation. Your blood turned to ice. Ahead was another horde. They weren’t paying attention to the two of you, but you looked at the sky. Ten minutes max until the sun had set. You looked to the sides and then nudged him towards the alley. He shook his head and jerked his head to the other side. A street. There were zombies down that way, but you could tell he wanted more options than an alley. There was one way in and one way out. You wanted the alley because you could pick the lock of a back door to a building.

He wasn’t budging, however, hand clutching your shirt, the other on the handle of his axe, ready to pull it from its spot.

You nod and lead him still holding onto your shirt towards the direction he wanted. You didn’t know why he held onto you if he was doing it to make sure he was following you but not having to watch you. Or if he was scared and holding on would keep him grounded. Either way, you made sure that his grip didn’t get too tight or he got too far behind. You were not having him yank you off balance. The zombies watched as you walked past them, and they stumbled towards you. Your heart thudded heavily in your chest, and you kept an eye on them.

“I know a place,” you murmur softly to Ryan, picking up the pace a bit. He nodded and released your shirt. You almost wanted to grab his hand, but you resisted the urge. You had been fine for months by yourself, and now you wanted to hold hands because you were scared and nervous. You knew that running would cause the zombies to start to chase, they were very much predators. If you ran, they would chase. If you walked, they would follow but lose interest if you were moving fast enough that they wouldn’t have hope of catching you.

A few corners and you found the building. A decrypted apartment building, one side had collapsed, but the other side was still secure enough. At least, so far. Ryan gave it a disapproving look and searched for another building. You twisted the handle and pressed your shoulder against the door. The hinges had rusted since you last stayed here. Ryan helped you crack the door wide enough so you both could slip through and then he shut it as you pulled out a flashlight from your backpack. A quick sweep confirmed that no zombies were on the bottom level. You quietly headed for the stairs and then bent down, it wasn’t hard to find a rock with some weight to it. Ryan looked at you in confusion but you tossed the rock up to the top of the stairs and handed him your baseball bat. You mentally counted to thirty before you tossed another one. When there was absolutely no noise, you jerked your chin to the stairs.

“What?” he whispered to you, “You want me to go first?”

“You’ve got the bat, I’ve got the light. Trade?” you asked, but he simply shrugged before taking a hesitant step on the stairs. You could tell he really didn’t like the idea of staying at the building, but really, neither of you had much choice at this point. The stairs creaked and bowed under his weight, and weren’t any better really when you followed behind him. In the hallway you counted the doors, there was one you had cleared out and found a spare key for. You had tucked it between the baseboard and the carpet. So it would glint when caught in the beam of a flashlight, but a quick sweep wouldn’t reveal it. Ryan stood watch as you bent down and found the key.

“Is this your place?” he asked.

“No, just found a key. I wanted to make sure zombies wouldn’t get in and fuck me over if I needed an emergency place,” you explained slipping the key into the lock. Just before you unlocked it there was a gurgle to your right. You swung the flashlight in the direction. A zombie with the flesh of its face sloughing off was emerging from one of the open doors. The only eye left in its eye sockets swept over the hall and landed on you. Ryan tightened his grip on the baseball bat. It gurgled again, taking a step forward, and then another appeared behind it. You shone the light behind them. At least eight were in the room behind that one.

Another step.

It was toying with you.

“Run,” you whispered, and Ryan dipped his head down.

“3,” he started to count down, and on one, both of you turned and took off. Down the stairs. Ryan took them four at a time, and then grabbed the door and yanked with all his might. It screamed as it opened, and you shoved his shoulder as he squeezed through the space. Dirty nails scraped your arm and you let out a muffled squeak in fear, but Ryan grabbed the collar of your shirt and ripped you through the opening. Your shirt ripped on a protruding nail, but you took off running.

The zombie let out the horrid screech to call the horde as the zombies ripped and pulled at the door, trying to get it open enough for them to burst forth from it. The sky was growing darker and you knew it was too late. The sun had gone down.

“Three blocks, take a right, keep going until I tell you!” you order to Ryan who was right beside you. He nodded his head, handing you back the baseball bat and removing his axe.

Your lungs burned as you followed your own directions, zombies coming at you two from every angle. Adding to the growing horde behind you. They weren’t exactly Olympic runners, but you could tell they were at least twenty feet from you. The moment you slowed or stopped they would be on you within seconds. That fear made you move, made Ryan move.

You yelled out another one-word command to Ryan, and you both jumped a fence in an alley. It would delay the zombies by a few seconds, and you ordered Ryan up the access ladder. The lock had been broken, and he yanked the panel that prevented people from climbing it closed and wedged a throwing knife where the lock would be to keep it closed to buy the two of you time. On the roof, you allowed yourself five seconds to breathe and then you told Ryan where to go now.

“If we can get to that hotel window, the third from the right, we can find another room to hide out for the night. The window broke a while ago, the glass cleared out. Can you make it?” you asked, it was only a three-foot jump, but you wanted to make sure. You would have to jump upwards to grab the ledge and yank yourself up. He would too, but he could get higher.

He nodded but looked slightly unsure.

“Run and jump,” you squeezed his arm before taking off. Main focus on the window. You heard his footsteps thumping behind you.

Three.

Two.

One.

You launched up, grabbed the ledge and hoisted yourself as quick as you could. Ryan hit the wall a second after you tumbled into the room and he struggled for a second but managed to climb into the room and collapse on the floor. You breathed heavily beside him, and he tried desperately to slow his breathing. Hand resting on his chest, other thrown haphazardly to the side.

You heard the distant noise of metal breaking.

“Another room, now,” you ordered, grabbing the curtain to the room and drawing it over the window to hide the obvious path from the zombies. Ryan got up and opened one of the two doors in the room. It led to another room, you breathed out a sigh of relief. He peeked inside before he whispered clear, and you hurried over and he shut both doors behind you. You locked the door to your room and made sure the deadbolt was on the front door to the hotel room.

Both of you forced your breathing to normal.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve had a proper bed,” he whispered to you, and then slowly sunk onto the bed.

You checked for bed bugs and shone the flashlight on the bed. It was dusty, but fine if a bit threadbare and moth-eaten.

“I’ll take first watch,” you offered, and turned off the flashlight. After a brief fight, he dropped his bag beside the bed, and a bit of rustling cloth and he thumped onto the mattress. Though after a while it was clear he wasn’t going to get sleep easily. You wouldn’t be sleeping easily either. Even as exhausted as you were.


	4. Chapter IV

You tore off the packaging to a granola bar, putting the wrapper into your backpack. It was a bit stupid, you could throw your trash on the ground. There were no laws, and honestly? The garbage was just going to end up in a bin that would never be emptied ever again. It was a habit, and you saw no reason to stop. The world was already a mess, you didn’t need to add to it. Besides, when Ryan woke up a few moments later, he too opened a granola bar wrapper and stuffed it into his bag. Neither of you spoke until your granola bars were finished, and you had taken a drink of water. He spoke up first.

“You never cherish something until you lose it,” he muttered, “I’d kill for a diet coke.”

“Why diet?” you asked, “Trying to watch your figure?”

“I drank at least four a day if I drank the normal stuff?” he made a noise, and then chuckled, “and don’t bring up the fact that the diet stuff is less healthy. If I get cancer, well…I used to say I’d die happy if I could go out drinking it. I guess the saying is true, you never know what you have until it’s gone…”

“I had food like that as well,” you offered, seeing his face fall. You knew what he meant, you’d kill for things to go back the way it was. To distract him, as well as yourself from the went on to tell him about your favourite food of all time, and how you’d probably never get to eat it again. After all, nonperishable foods were the only foods you’d trust eating, and all the good stuff had been picked clean before the war had gotten as bad as it had. It quickly became a game of who could think of the most specific food that they might not ever eat again. In the most ideal situations you would find a farm, hopefully with animals still on it, and figure out how to sustain yourself off the farm. Fresh eggs and milk would be great, and honestly, no one thought about grabbing flour or sugar when the world started going to shit. You would be able to make cookies, or pancakes, or something! You didn’t want to think about the worst situation.

He stands up eventually, zipping his bag closed in the process. He stretched his hands high over his head, a brief flash of skin as his shirt rose above his pants before he yanked on his jacket and zipped it halfway up. You fight back a yawn as you stuff your things into your bag and attach your sleeping bag to it. Yanking on it to make sure you wouldn’t lose it from a snag or the like. The sun had begun to cast a soft pale glow above the curtains, and he cracked them open slightly to peek out. As you stood up, he dropped the curtain and scratched at his beard. The gentle scritch, scritch filled the air and you could almost pretend that the outside world didn’t exist. It was just you and Ryan in a hotel room, that there was no zombies or end of the world.

However, the calm was too brittle, and you pulled out the map and spread it out on the foot of the bed. Ryan sat down next to you on the bed, muffling a yawn with his fist as you dragged your finger over the path the two of you had been taking last night before the hordes interrupted the pathway. It took a moment, but both of you retraced your steps and figured out where you currently were. You knew the paths off the top of your head from previous encounters, but never really bothered marking them on the map. Besides, you hadn’t actually stayed in the hotel the last time you took this path. There had been a horde on the ground, and you had taken the roof to stay out of their view. You had noticed the broken glass and made a mental note as you headed over to another roof and got down through a fire escape.

“Okay, this put us only a few minutes off course,” you murmured, “We’ll have to head back, but we shouldn’t go the same way.”

A brief silence, before he dragged his finger along a path, “We can go this way, it’ll take us past where we were last night. If there’s anywhere we can cut through it’ll save us some time.”

You nodded, “If there’s any sort of issue, we can take this route,” you copied his movements, moving a few streets down, “The street is narrower but that’s why it’s plan b.”

“Should we wait any longer?” he asked, checking his watch. You look at it as well, and he tilted his wrist to let you take a better look.

“Up to you.”

“It might be a bit dangerous, but I’d rather get a head start. I don’t know about you, but I would rather have a place to sleep well before the sun goes down tonight.”

With that, you were tucking away the map and swinging your bag onto your back. Ryan opened the door to the hallway, the chances of jumping back out the window to the other side was a bit slim in the morning when you both were still hazy with sleep. Better safe than sorry. Besides, if Ryan had checked out the window first, and decided to go out onto the hallway, you assumed the roof was still swarmed with zombies.

You trudged after him, the bed had been one of the comfier things you had slept on since this whole thing started…but you hadn’t gotten much sleep. When you had ‘woken up’ to take your shift, Ryan had told you to get another hour of actual rest because he knew you hadn’t been properly asleep. When the switch actually occurred, Ryan’s sleep was nearly just as none existent as yours. You could tell he got more sleep than you did, but it was still fitful. Your eyes ached with sleep, and you ran your fingers through your hair to try to get it as tidy as you could so you could tie it back. During your confinement, they hadn’t bothered cutting the prisoners hair. Just forced those with longer hair to tie it back, and those with shorter hair that grew over their eyes either got a hack job to get bangs or a hair band to push them back. Four years of hair growth was great if you had scissors to trim off the split ends…but in this life, all long hair did was get in the way.

Ryan seemed to agree with your unvoiced thoughts, shoving his bangs away from his face. You made a mental note to grab some scissors at the next grocery store. Even if they were kitchen scissors, they’d do. Anything to make your life even slightly easier.

The hotel was uneventful, and the entrance had a broken door that let the both of you exit quietly and quickly. Neither of you spoke for a solid five minutes, and Ryan had just started to ask you a question when you heard a zombie shriek and then suddenly Ryan’s arm clipped your hip as he went down. You let out a yelp, raising your baseball bat and trying to make heads or tails of the situation.

Ryan had the zombies neck in his hand, holding the head as far away as he could as he struggled to grasp his axe. For an instant, the zombie escaped Ryan’s grasp and you screamed and slammed your baseball bat into the side of the zombies head. The zombie jerked to the side and Ryan was able to shove it the rest of the way off. You slammed the bat into the zombies head again, and then Ryan got his axe out and finished the job.

He was covered in splattered blood, and you grabbed his sleeve. Panic raced through your body as you dragged him away from the dead body and soon you two were running away with abandon. Eventually, he grabbed you and pulled you into an empty building and into the back room. Your chest was heaving, and you felt close to tears. This was the first time a zombie had actually gotten close enough to be a true threat. Normally they were far enough away when you noticed them that by the time they got close enough to even reach for you, you would be able to kill them.

“Strip,” you blurted out, tugging at his jacket. His eyes widened slightly.

“What? Why?” he took half a step back.

“Were you bit? Do bites turn people?” you ask, taking a hesitant step back from him as well.

“I didn’t get bit,” he told you and plucked his jacket, “Even if he tried, I have a few too many layers to pierce my skin.”

“I-” you started, but the panic was just slowly getting worse.

He sighed, unzipped his jacket and then removed his shirt. He did a slow turn and you searched every inch of his skin for a sign of broken skin. Nothing. You let out a huge sigh and closed your eyes. You lean against the wall and then slid to the floor, letting the bat drop to the floor beside you with a hollow thud.

The pure fear that you had felt wasn’t for yourself…it was for him. You had never seen anyone turn before, and the fear of the unknown scared you. You didn’t know if it was like a switch was flipped, and suddenly he had no knowledge of himself…or if it turned on the instinctual part of your brain and dimmed the rational part. Or if it took control of your body so that you could see and know what’s happening but couldn’t control it. What if it was the later? What if you had to take your baseball bat to his skull and he knew what was happening? Afraid that he couldn’t tell you it was still him!

Ryan bent down, and gently placed a hand on your knee. “Hey, it’s okay,” he whispered softly, other hand moving to your shoulder and squeezing it. “Don’t cry.”

You had read stories where people start crying and didn’t realize it, and you always thought it was bullshit…but you reached up and wiped at your blurrying eyes and realized that you were indeed crying. You felt your cheeks heat up, and you roughly scrubbed at your eyes to try to stop the flow of tears. You shouldn’t be crying, you barely knew him. He barely knew you. You had no idea if he would kick you to the curb the moment you became an inconvenience, and yet you were crying for him.

He shifted and was sitting beside you, hand still on your knee, a solid presence. “You can tell me if you don’t want me to touch you,” he murmured, patting your knee, “I’m here, I’m okay. You’re okay. We are both fine, safe, and alive.”

You leaned towards him slightly, so your arm brushed against his, and you stayed there. Staring at his hand with your mind racing. Thoughts bounced around your skull, filling it to the brim until you just wanted to sleep and not both with the world. You thought of the zombies, you thought of Ryan, you thought of your own mortality, you thought of the last time someone had comforted you with just a simple touch. You were overwhelmed with the abundance.

Mostly, you thought about his group. Would they accept you? If they didn’t, you didn’t know if you could survive again alone. Even if it had been two days, you felt yourself attached to Ryan. If he left you alone? At the start, it wasn’t so bad, really. At the start, there was just you and nothing else. You had been so mad at the world that it didn’t matter that you were alone because you didn’t want anyone else there. A few months ago you started to crave that human connection again. You wanted to be able to talk to someone and have an argument, have a genuine conversation. Just…something better than the grunts, gurgles, and moans of the beasts wandering the streets. If you were thrust back out into the world by yourself you would be forced back into isolation instead of welcoming it with open arms. It reminded you of the conversation you had that exact morning. You never know what you have until it’s gone. You had lived through isolation for far too long, and your apprehension to meeting him was purely fear that you would be alone again after meeting him.

You didn’t know what scared you more, the zombies, or the isolation.

“Is it better with a group?” you whisper after what seemed like minutes, but your eyes flashed to his watch and you saw it had been a good thirty minutes. You’d need to get moving soon if you didn’t want to lose more travel time. “Is it less scary? Do you sleep better?”

He shifted, and then rested his head against the wall and sighed. “Well…it depends. It can be. There are more people to take shifts at night, so there are some nights where you can get a full nights rest. More people means it’s less likely a single zombie can sneak up on you because more pairs of eyes are safer. However, when you’re in a group you do get tense moments. Fighting amongst ourselves after a stressful moment, people can become quick to anger and get frustrated with the same routines…None of my group would ever dare harm another one…but verbal fights do happen, and it just adds on top of a regular stressful day, you know?” he sighs, “Though, I wouldn’t trade them for anything.”

Suddenly, he jumps to his feet startling you. His hand extends out towards you, and you take it. A shoot of fear rushing through your veins, did he hear a zombie horde cry? Did he see something?

“I promise if I start to turn and it’s a slow process. I will give you my axe and give you full permission to end it, and if you want. I will end your suffering if you start to turn, as well. There’s nothing we can do for all the zombies in the world, but it’s something we can do for each other,” he pats the side of the axe on his hip. You weren’t sure if you could bring yourself to swing the axe at his head, even if he was a zombie…you knew him now. However, you nod and he yanks you to your feet. You’re standing a bit close to him, and you can smell the effects of an apocalypse. It wasn’t an unpleasant scent, but if it was before the apocalypse, you would’ve been grossed out.

“I promise as well,” you murmur, “Let’s…let’s just avoid alleyways as much as possible today, alright?”

He gives you a light smile, “Yeah, deal.”

He squeezes your hand and then checks his watch, “We’ve got a few hours of daylight left. Let’s push onwards.”

The two of you move back onto the main road, and you belatedly realize that he was still holding your hand.

You didn’t have enough energy to let go, and even if you did…you really didn’t want to.


	5. Chapter V

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yo! Sorry for the late update, I got my wisdom teeth out three days ago.

The sun was just moving past noon when Ryan paused and lifted his head. It had been around a full twenty-four hours since he had nearly been bitten, and you were still jumping and grabbing his arm whenever a zombie growled or got too close to either of you. You would feel embarrassed by the fact if he wasn’t doing the same. It was subtle, but it was there. Tensing suddenly, hand reaching towards you slightly, or his hand jumping to his axe before you could register the movement.

“I recognize this area,” he murmured, and you relaxed. He looked around, “There’s the park with the car rammed into the swing set,” he pointed it out to you and then pointed at a cluster of buildings. “Its a few blocks down that way.”

“Then let’s get going!” you smiled up at him and saw the hope and anticipation growing in his eyes. You felt nervous, a slight flutter in your chest. It had only been two days, but you were excited to meet other survivors besides Ryan. He led the way down the streets, still reacting immediately to zombies, but moving past them. You followed closely behind, nearly tripping on his heels. The streets were cleared from dead bodies in this area, and you wanted to ask Ryan about it, but he stopped and you bumped into his back.

“Sorry,” he turned around, hand steadying you, but his eyes on the building. “It’s this one; we got to the rooftop and made a small camp. Come on.”

The access to the roof was through the building itself. An entire portion of the stairs had collapsed at one point, but there was a metal ladder suspended over the opening. Ryan took this as a sign that someone was out doing a run, he explained they pulled it up when everyone was in. You pointed out they could be waiting for him, and he said he was supposed to report home nearly a day and a half ago. People who disappear for more than a day general stay gone.

He left it suspended over the gap, just in case someone was still out, and then led you up the stairs. Near the top, he began to take two at a time, and you felt giddy as well. Sure, it would be awkward since they’d all be over him and you’d just be in the background, but to see more than one surviving person? You were ecstatic.

He pushed open the roof access door and strode out, a greeting on his lips.

You freeze just outside the door, there was no one? You wanted to tell him maybe he got the location wrong…but it couldn’t be. There wouldn’t be another building that also had a ladder over top of a broken staircase. Or that was exactly three blocks from a park with a car driven into a swing set. The odds were slim, and so you kept silent as his eyes swept over the rooftop. They left him…they thought he was dead. The chances of him finding them again were slim unless he was a tracker and could find them in the middle of a city somehow.

There were signs that people had been there, what you thought was a random metal garbage can was actually a fire pit upon closer inspection. Ryan was looking around the circumference of the building to see if he could find some sort of clue. You prod at a piece of charcoal and a piece of white flashed from beneath the blackness. After you had shifted the charcoal with a less burnt piece of 2X4, you removed the piece of paper. It was not burnt at all, most likely placed there after the charcoal had cooled. It was marked with black but mostly readable. You called to Ryan, trying to figure out the words on the note, but the writing was horrible, and whatever was written on it was indecipherable.

He appeared at your shoulder, hand reaching out to steady your hands so he could read it better, and then he paused and gently took it from you. There was a small span of silence and then he sighed. “Do you feel comfortable leaving the city?”

“What? Why?” you asked, plucking the paper back from him, “What does it say?”

Ryan ran his finger over the scribbles, “Rye. North Camp. Love G.”

“G?” you asked, as he stalked away to the north end of the building. You hurried after him, squinting your eyes to see if you could see a large group of people moving.

“Geoff wrote it,” Ryan said matter of factly when you didn’t respond he glanced down at you. “He was the leader of the group for a week before he gave up and Lindsay took over.”

You thought about his previous question. Were you comfortable leaving the city? The immediate answer that leapt to your lips was ‘no.’ Of course, you wouldn’t be, it was all you had known since the beginning of this new life. You had also been alone and scared of meeting another person, not knowing what they were going to do. You were scared of leaving because you didn’t want to, but you knew that staying was useless. Eventually, the food source would deplete and you’d be stuck in the city unable to find enough courage to go out into the world on your own. If you chose to stay, you didn’t know if Ryan would go or if he would stay with you. Of course, you leaned more heavily towards the chance of him leaving. He had known his group of survivors much longer than he had known you, and all his talk of not leaving someone behind would be swept aside if he felt he needed to.

There was nothing in this city for you, and as much as it scared you, Ryan was currently the only thing you had. You had to go with him.

“So, where is this north camp?” you asked, taking a deep breath, “We’ll need to stop and gather as many supplies as we can, there should be a hunting store nearby where we can pick up some survival gear.”

You saw his body relax, and you wondered what had been going through his mind, but before you could ask he looked at his watch. “We’ll head out tomorrow morning, this is a secure spot, but we’ll go out to get supplies tonight so we can organize tonight and head out first thing.”

He turned and headed back over to the door with you close behind. Before he entered the building he stopped and turned back towards you, “Should we bother trying to hotwire a vehicle?”

Your eyebrows shot up, “Do…do you know how to hotwire a car?”

There was a short pause and then he nodded, when you didn’t say anything immediately he held up a hand, “Okay. Before you start to think I was some sort of criminal, I got bored easily.”

“So…you googled how to hotwire a car?” you asked incredulously, “Normally when I got bored, I’d watch a movie or something, not research illegal activities!”

“Well, back then there was no use for it, but now? My skills are very useful. Besides, most vehicles now are very hard to hotwire, unlike older models.”

The way he said that…almost sounded like it was okay simply because it was hard to do most of the time. Either way, you sighed and shook your head, “We’d have to worry about siphoning gas, I know how to do it…but-”

“But what? We’d get to the camp faster, and it’s not like anyone needs those vehicles anymore,” he pointed out and then looked at his watch, “We can worry about that later after we get back.”

“Are you sure you weren’t a criminal?” you asked, smiling to let him know you were just teasing him before opening the door and gesturing towards the stairs. You didn’t even care when he didn’t reply, just snorted, and started down the stairs. At least, his group disappearing didn’t bring him down. He was still chipper and didn’t seem troubled when you looked at him when he wasn’t paying attention to you. He left the ladder where it was when you mentioned that someone could stumble upon the ladder and decide to either go up to the roof or take it; he reassured you that there weren’t too many people in the city and none of them would bother taking an entire ladder.

The streets were pretty bare, which was good for the both of you. He took the lead, heading towards the nearest convenience store to stock up on anything the two of you could stuff into your two bags. Water was hard to find, but you prayed that there would be some water bottles in the back. Ryan stepped over some fallen brick, pointing out some that looked like they would make too much noise if either of you knocked them.

“So…” you spoke up, as he scanned the road ahead for any threats while you glanced behind. “This camp…what is it exactly? I mean all I’ve heard you say is it’s in the North.”

“Well, by North I mean the direction, it’s not the Northern part of the city,” he explained and then pointed to some zombies lumbering off to the side. You nodded and you both skirted around them before speaking again.

“I gathered that,” you said drily, and he opened his mouth to correct himself, but you powered on, “What is it?”

He was silent for a moment, “It’s supposedly a military camp, we were told to retreat there. I mean we ignored the order to check on our friends and family, that’s why Geoff and I ended up here.”

“A military camp,” you parroted quietly, a bit of apprehension filled your stomach, and he must’ve sensed it because he turned back towards you with a firm look.

“Whatever happened in the past with the war is over now, you won’t be thrown into a cell just because you rebelled against the war,” he told you with so much certainty you were inclined to believe him. “I won’t let them if they try, the war was stupid, and if I had half a mind I would’ve joined the so-called ‘rebels’ when I could.”

“It’s not like you single-handedly caused the end of the world,” you reassured, “There was a conscription…those who didn’t rebel were forced to join, remember? A few of my friends were…well they didn’t go and they faced the serious consequences…”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, reaching forwards and squeezing your arm.

You swallowed thickly, “But that’s in the past, as you said,” and you brushed past him and scanned the road ahead. “We can’t think of the past….not with the world like it is. We need to look to the future and see if we can’t fix any of this shit…”

“Let’s start small,” he laughed, “I don’t think we can repair a building with just the two of us, and with my group? Nah, still too little.”

You agreed and stopped across the road of the convenience store. He squinted towards the doors. “I can see three zombies in there…I don’t like those odds.”

Pursing your lips you look around, and then point at a ladder, “If you climb up that, and toss a brick into the window glass of the store across the street-”

“You expect me to throw a brick across the street?”

“That’s why you’re on the roof,” you pointed out, “I’ll hide behind-”

“I have an easier idea,” he bent down and scooped up a cell phone, the screen cracked. You ignored the skeleton less than five feet away and raised your eyebrow at him.

“You gonna text the zombies away?” you crossed your arms, “I think my plan is a bit more…logical?”

“No,” he pressed the button on the side and waited. The screen lit up dimly and your eyebrows flew up. “Holy shit,” he muttered.

Holy shit indeed. You hadn’t seen a working piece of technology that wasn’t a flashlight for the longest time. He muttered something as the home screen shone up towards the two of you, you stepped closer as he slid his finger across the screen. You held your breath and felt it rush out of you when it unlocked without asking for a password, or worse facial recognition. He opened up the clock and made sure the volume was all the way up before setting an alarm for five minutes and setting it up across the street from the store.

“Now, let’s get over to the alleyway and hide there, hopefully, this will draw the zombies out,” he nudged you away.

You followed after him and crouched beside the wall, poised on the balls of your feet ready to run. Ryan bent down behind you, his hand rest against the wall behind you. His chest brushed against your arm, and you could feel his breath occasionally on your shoulder, and you felt your body bristle with gooseflesh, and you held your breath.

It was an intense five minutes but eventually, you heard Africa by Toto blaring across the street, and Ryan mumbled the words quietly under his breath. You almost laughed but managed a short burst of air through your nose instead. He nudged you with his shoulder, and then repeated the gesture a second later as the zombies emerged from the store and started shambling over towards the phone. You didn’t know if they’d come back but it was a chance you’d have to take.

Sneaking around to the front of the store was easy, and so was getting in. You immediately head to the back as he searched around the front, thankful there wasn’t a zombie lurking in the back, the smell of death was strong and unpleasant. Your stomach churned but you searched for any water supplies, and thankfully you found a package of 24 unopened bottles and lugged it into the front. The zombies were still surrounding the phone that had gone silent; he reassured you quietly that he had set it to go off again in three minutes in case the zombies wandered back towards the store.

He had a map of the state spread out on the counter, and he was running a finger along a road. You half kept watch and half poured some of the water into the water bag in your backpack and then separated the rest of the bottles between your bags. “We should find a survival store next,” you murmured zipping up his bag and then peering over his shoulder to look at the map. “You know where we need to go?”

He nodded, “Can you get us through the city? We need to avoid toxic zones; I want to get there as soon as possible but…”

“I can,” you reassured him, and pulled out your own map, “There is a store that sells hunting gear and outdoor shit up here,” you tapped up in the northern end of the city, “We can circle this way and get there by tomorrow evening if everything goes as planned.”

“Sounds good,” he agreed, “Let’s get out of here.”

“Should we grab the phone? It might be useful later,” you suggested, and he looked out the window as you folded the map. There was a moment of silent contemplation and then he shook his head.

“No…there are more zombies around it now. As much as it’d be super useful, we’ll make do without it.”

“Never thought I’d hear someone say they could survive without technology,” you sighed, and then grinned up at him, “Though, I’d kill to have my consoles and PC back, all my unfinished games,” you groaned, “I was nearly to level ten in Dead by Daylight as the killer.”

His eyes lit up, “Dead By Daylight?”

“It was amazing,” you sighed, “Super fun to play with friends too.”

“I was getting up there with my killer; I liked the machete killer the best. The wraith was too sick for me.”

You wanted to delve deeper into the conversation, but you stopped yourself as you glanced out the window. A zombie had lifted its head and was looking around. “We should cut out the back way,” you suggested quietly.

“Good idea.”


	6. Chapter VI

“You were in theatre?” you interrupted his story of him burning his hand while welding a set together for a play. “Were you good?” He looked back at you, despairingly. You held your hands up in defense, “Just asking.”

“I was…okay…I mean, I was in a few plays. I played Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing,” he shrugged, “No one likes Claudio because he- well he makes very poor choices.”

You laughed, “Isn’t he like the main character in that play? You were okay and yet you got the main role?”

“Well - yeah, okay, I was pretty okay,” he allowed, and you saw the playful grin letting you know that he was fully joking around about the situation. The two of you fell silent, but it was natural and comfortable. Well, the silence between the two of you was comfortable, but only for a short while. There was always the sound of shuffling undead, groans and moans in the distance, and no sounds of animals. You hadn’t heard the sound of a bird chirping in the morning for months. You had wondered if they fled the cities from the undead, or if they had died out from radiation poisoning. There hadn’t even been any crows or ravens pecking at the recently dead, though most of the actual dead bodies had passed the point of edibility for animals.

The edge of the city was getting closer, it was well past noon, but there was still a few hours of sunlight left. Just enough that you hesitated on the on-ramp that led to the freeway. Ryan didn’t notice, a few strides ahead of you. The roads were clear, not much point of traveling if the end of the world was coming and most of the citizens were either already in bunkers or on the front lines. A few cars littered the freeway, you could see them from where you stood. Some of them had dead bodies slumped against the steering wheel, or were devoid of any creature. One had a zombie sitting in it, the only giveaway was the fact that it still had flesh covering its bones. Most had rotted away, but something in the chemical toxin had made the zombies decompose slower, and have flies and other carrion creatures avoid them.

Ryan got to the top of the on-ramp before he noticed you weren’t behind him. He turned around, “Are you okay?”

If you were honest with yourself, you weren’t. The city promised shelter, food, and water. Sure there were zombies everywhere…but it was the price to pay. Out in the wild, there were trees. You didn’t even know if any animals survived the end of the world, surely they must’ve, but you didn’t know if you really wanted to take that chance. You didn’t want to be alone anymore, you really didn’t…but you knew you wouldn’t be chosen over his group if he had to make a choice.

“I-” you start, but stop as he walked back over to you.

“It will be a long trip. We’ll hurt, we’ll sweat, we’ll get blisters, slivers, and cuts and scrapes. We’ll want to collapse onto a bed at the end of the night, but all there will be is hard ground and half a night’s sleep. I know, but at the end?” he said, not reassuring you in the slightest. “At the end, there will be more people, they will allow us to catch up on all the sleep we missed, we’ll have plenty of food, water, and shelter. We’ll have protection, and at the end of this journey if we never want to talk to each other again because we’ve heard the same stories over and over again? Well, we won’t have to, there will be plenty of people to chat with. Don’t worry, the end will justify the means.”

“How far do we have to go?” you asked, staring behind him at the freeway. He was silent for what felt like the longest time, your eyes flicked back towards him and searched his face for some sort of answer. He finally rubbed his face.

“A long ways.”

“All through the wilderness.”

“Yeah.”

The silence that followed ate at you, and you felt the urge to run back to the southern end of the city and stay in the safety of what you knew. Instead, you adjusted your newly acquired backpack made for hiking and exhaled heavily.

“We should make one more stop at a store before we leave then,” you suggested, and he nodded. Together you headed back down the on-ramp and backtracked a few blocks until you reached a tiny strip mall. You looted it until it was bare bones, gathering as much as you could carry and reasonably use. Yesterday, the two of you had spent the day finding equipment for the travel. Freshly clothed, with extras in case the pair you had on got ruined or wet, with two layers of jackets, a thick sweater, and a heavy outer coat. New shoes for both of you, good hiking shoes that would’ve cost a combination of over $300 if purchased before the war. New backpacks. The works. There wasn’t even zombie blood on your clothes yet, which was always a good thing.

Once the weight was once again evenly distributed, Ryan led the way back to the freeway.

This time, once you got halfway up, you continued on with nothing more than a twinge of regret.

The minutes turned into an hour, and you two were well on your way out of the city. Honestly, the wild wasn’t forests or anything like that. It was still buildings and desert. Ryan explained that it would still be quite sometime before you two actually hit an area where there would be no cities or towns for a while. You were on a major interstate after all. Quite a few cities would back onto it. You knew that, but all those tiny towns and cities would have been picked clean by this point. Or have a knit group of survivors who would rather kill newcomers than share. He didn’t push down your crazy ideas, and that just made you nervous.

“Why didn’t more people try to flee the major cities?” you asked, seeing the cars dwindle out until there was only a few every so often. A few were run off the road, and many more had bullet holes in them. Ryan looked at you, his face full of curiosity.

“You were isolated,” he commented, “How much did they tell you?”

“Nothing bad, only the good, and they glazed over the rest,” you muttered quietly, “We didn’t get to know anything.”

You avoided his look resolutely, walking around a portion of the road that had cracked and pitted from weathering, and wildlife breaking through. “The military started to slip their grasp over the population near the end of the war, a lot of people had already died from the fighting, and mass areas had been bombed. You see, when people get scared they try to run away,” he waved to a minivan with two skeletons in the front seat, you were glad the back windows were tinted enough you couldn’t see past. “But the military didn’t want that, this country became controlled by the military and they decided that if there were still people, they could fight. Children could fight.” There was a sharp note to his tone, “They rounded up countless people telling them they would be taken to a safe haven, but they only took those well enough to fight. Those who couldn’t, they thought they were missing out and tried to follow. They were killed.”

You stumbled, head snapping towards him, “Killed?” you parroted weakly, “By who?”

“The military, they had no need for weak people anymore and by that point, you could tell the world was going to shit regardless. They wanted to be on top. When we got news, Geoff, he flipped his shit first, but before we could run off, we were attacked. We were transported to a hospital further inland, and I had less damage, but Geoff needed skin grafts,” you watched as he walked past you, eyes not focusing truly on the road ahead of him, just marching on silently. “Sometimes I’m glad for the acid, but…other times I’m…” he trailed off, shaking his head. “What did they do to the ‘prisoners’?” he asked, clearly trying to get his mind off his own troubling past.

You wanted to play it off, say that you had clothes on your back, meals, and a place to stay, but the truth of it wasn’t as cushy as that would make it seem. It had started fine. A prisoner, treated fairly and as a human, even if people thought you were awful for opposing the war. Then it grew more and more twisted as the war went on, suddenly you were a spy for another country and they thought that you had insight and you were sent here to weaken the country. You used to wake every night screaming from the memories of the inside of your cell, stripped of personality white and stark. Nothing but a thin mattress on the ground after you were deemed unworthy of comfort, you were no longer a human being. Then there was the first notion that shit wasn’t right when people started to disappear. Both prisoners and guards. One by one. Whether murdered or fled, you still didn’t know. When the war was lost, your compound was ordered to evacuate immediately to a safer area. From what Ryan had just said you assumed they were either bringing you and the other prisoners to the front line or were going to line you up against a wall and shoot you. No prisoners meant there was no need for the guards to stick around.

Once you saw that bomb hit, everyone split up and ran. Throwing caution to the wind. If you had any sense of direction or memory after that, you would’ve been able to point in the direction of the compound. It was close by, but you didn’t.

You told him a few details, and after little convincing on his part, the words tumbled out of your mouth. Faster than you could stop them. You hadn’t been able to confess what had happened to you to anyone, no one to talk to, no one to get something off your chest, to relieve you of the burden of your thoughts. Talking made the time go faster, and soon the sun was setting and he was walking closer to you. Arms brushing against one another as he led you off the road towards an abandoned motel.


	7. Chapter VII

Your eyes burst open. Something was wrong. You didn’t know what it was at first, and you jerk to a sitting position. The motel was dark but you saw Ryan slumped over in the chair by the door, hand resting on the baseball bat draped across his lap. You idly wondered when he got that, it had been beside you when you fell asleep. There was a groan and you felt your stomach churn heavily, a zombie materialized from the dark, lurching forwards towards Ryan. A shout ripped from your lungs as you fought off the comfort and lunged to your feet. Ryan woke up violently, shoving back. The chair shattered as it cracked against the floor. The zombie moved faster than you could, its teeth tearing into Ryan’s arm as Ryan screamed and struggled.

You grabbed the bat from the floor and slammed it into the zombie’s head. Over and over and over again. The zombie fell heavily to the ground. You continued your relentless beating until the bat broke and splintered in your hands and the blood splattered against the wall and Ryan’s screams quieted. That sound frightened you even more than anything else. He had pulled himself against the wall, clutching at the heavily bleeding bite mark on his arm. His face pale and his eyes dilated until the blue was nearly consumed by the darkness. You dropped the pieces of the bat to the ground, dropping to your knees beside him.

The skin was already darkening and turning green as it rotted. His hand grabbed your wrist and you looked into his eyes. The pure fear there was stifling.

“Don’t let me turn,” he begged, his voice higher than normal.

“I…I…” you stutter, looking around. Your eyes catch his axe and you wrap your fingers around the wooden handle. “I…I can amputate your arm,” you offer, “I can’t- I can’t- Can’t lose you.”

“Do it!” his grip tightens and you shift him so he was laying down, arm extended out so you could get a better angle. You place the edge of the axe against his skin, seeing his veins starting to turn black and speed up his arm. “Do it!” he cried again, tears pouring down his face, and you raise the axe and slam it down. Blood sprayed, and his arm came clean off just above the elbow. You grabbed his jacket to help stop the bleeding. The blood was black. Pouring out at such an alarming rate that your knees were covered, and you couldn’t stop it. You couldn’t stop it. No matter what you did. He kept begging you to stop the bleeding. You were failing him. He was dying. You were failing.

“I’m turning,” he blurted out, and when you looked up his face was a muddle of blues and greens. Eyes dulling with cataracts and cheeks sunken in. Death alive. “You have to kill me.”

A blade is in your hands before you knew it, and his good hand was guiding it to his chest. “No. No! Nononono! I can’t no, please, we can-”

“You promised me!” he snapped, “You promised. You can’t let me live. Kill me. Kill me! End my misery before it begins!” he demanded. He was too strong. His grip too tight. Guiding, pulling, the knife towards his chest. “If this was you, I’d help you!”

“You’ll fail me,” his voice changed, calmer, “Do it.”

“DO IT!” he roared, startling you. You couldn’t stop yourself. Raising the blade and plunging it straight down.

You woke violently with your heart jumping into your throat and your legs tangling in the blankets. A cry in your throat.  Hands touched your arms, and you thrashed, ready to scream, but one of the hands slam over your mouth. A hissing noise sent your fear bursting out. You bite down on the hand. There was a loud curse and the hands left your body allowing you a moment to take a breath, scuttle away from the threat, and assess what was going on.

From the scant light, there was, you could see the outline of Ryan, rubbing one of his hands. No words were spoken between you as he slowly eased down onto the bed, reaching up and place a finger against his mouth. You realized belatedly that the hissing noise was simply him shushing you, and not the hiss of a zombie or creature of your dark imagination. As your heartbeat quieted, and your breathing evened out, you shifted closer to him, you legs bumping against his hip. He quietly placed the unbitten hand on your knee, squeezing it gently. He wasn’t looking at you fully, he was looking towards the front of the motel room, waiting and listening for anything that would’ve been attracted to the noise you had caused.

Just the weight of his hand helped relax you, it was the hand of the arm you had chopped off in your dream. You fingers seemed to move of their own accord, reaching out and touching his forearm, uncovered from his jacket and sweaters. The skin was cool to the touch with a hint of human warmth. No sign of infection or stress. You didn’t notice your fingers searching his skin until his head moved and you flicked your eyes up to see him staring at you, one eyebrow slightly cocked up. He shifted a bit closer, voice low when he spoke, “Are you okay?”

“Nightmare, sorry,” you murmur, dropping your hands into your lap and averting your eyes. You cheeks warmed up in embarrassment as the reality of the situation hit you. You pull your knees up to your chest and you scoot back until your back touches the wall.

“Want to talk about it?” he asked.

You want to, you really do…but at the same time, you didn’t want to. It was odd, but you assumed it was mostly from the embarrassment of waking up screaming because of a nightmare. Of course, Ryan seemed genuinely concerned about your nightmare, and you wondered if you had spoken in your sleep.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want,” he added after a moment of silence. “Are you able to go back to sleep?”

“No,” you shook your head, “No, I’ll take over.”

He didn’t protest as you got up off the bed, but as you went to step between him and the other bed, his hand stopped you gently. “You’ve been alone all this time, and you haven’t had anyone to talk to…if you want…if you need…I am here,” his voice was comforting in the dark. There was a moment where you didn’t move, just looked down at him in silent relief.

You lowered yourself down onto the other bed, knees touching his. You stuttered at first, but then the words poured out. You told him everything, looking at your knees. It was therapeutic in a sense. Just the fact that he was listening was a relief to you. Now that you were awake most of the specific details were fading from your mind, narrowing until you could only remember the actual bite and cutting his arm off. When you told him of the amputation, his hand scratched at the skin. You fiddled with a tear in the knee of your jeans as you finished reliving the dream. He reached out with the hand that he had lost in your subconscious and squeezed your hand.

“Hey,” he said softly, “You’re fine, I’m fine. We are fine. Sure, a zombie can sneak up on us outside and take us by surprise, but in here? We’d hear it well before it got in, it would, no could never sneak up on us when we’re inside. Besides, there are a lot fewer zombies out here. We will survive this, together. Trust me.”

“I do,” you tell him, feeling no negative twisting of your gut or a voice screaming in your head that you were an idiot for saying that. You felt calm and relieved once the words left your mouth and you saw him smile in the dark. His hand tightened around yours, and you found your fingers intertwined with his, his thumb brushing against the side of yours. A quiet moment in all the stress.

“I trust you as well,” he admitted, “If I was, to be honest, I’ve trusted you since I was nearly bitten by that zombie. If you wanted me gone or dead, you wouldn’t have helped me when I was attacked.”

“Funny,” you murmured, “I’ve trusted you since then as well.”

He laughed, “You okay to be up alone? Or should I stay up for a bit longer?”

“You can sleep,” you stand up but he doesn’t let go of your hand, and you stare down at his blue eyes. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, standing up. He was a lot closer to you than he had been before, or at last, this was the first time you had noticed it quite like this. You wondered if the tingle in your body was simply from being so close to another human after so long, or if it was…attraction to him. You had to admit he was quite handsome, with his blonde hair and blue eyes, his innocent look that was interrupted by almost infinite knowledge about the world. However, you gently brushed aside those thoughts. They could be dealt with later, you didn’t need to sort out whether you were attracted to this man or not until a later date. Running for your lives didn’t exactly scream ‘romance’.

“I’m sure,” you assured him, squeezing his hand, “Thank you, Ryan. Really.”

“No problem,” he gave you a wide smile, that made your stomach flip, “Anytime.”

You released his hand, but before you could head to the chair, his arms were around you pulling you into a gentle and quick hug. It was over too soon and you wanted more of it. He seemed a bit embarrassed by his actions at first, especially when neither of you said anything. He went to step away but you quickly encircled your arms around his waist and stepped forward. Not clutching him to you, but just…holding him. His arms slowly came around your shoulder, and his cheek rested against the side of your head. It was just a hug.

“I haven’t had a hug in years,” you whisper against his shoulder, “I forgot how nice they feel.”

His grip tightened slightly, and he rocked back and forth, swaying you in his arms. “Then you won’t want for hugs again as long as I’m around. They say I give the best hugs.”

You laugh, “I don’t have many recent hugs to compare it to, but it is pretty great.”

He chuckled, and then gave one last squeeze and let go. “If you want more hugs, I need to sleep. If you want to talk about your dream more, just let me know. I’m here for you.”

You smile up at him, “Thank you, Ryan. Now, get to bed, and let’s put this night behind us.”

“Agreed,” he leaned down and pressed a kiss to your forehead before turning and climbing into the bed. You couldn’t fully react to the situation before he had pulled the blanket over his body. You slowly turned around and went over to the chair, hesitating before you sat down.

At least that would give you something else to think about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Imma try to force myself back into writing by uploading. Get some motivation through you guys <3 Sorry for the long wait between chapters you guys. Hopefully you all enjoy it :D


	8. Chapter VIII

Your feet ached, but you kept your comments to yourself. Last night you had to wrap Ryan’s foot after he stepped on a nail that had been covered up by some vines. Complaining that your feet were a bit sore from walking so much seemed like an asshole move when he limped beside you. With the injury, both of you were moving slower and he seemed a bit irritated by that fact, especially when he had to take more breaks to rest his foot. He had grumbled about the chances that he’d step on a nail out here and not in the city for most of the night, and when you suggested taking the day to rest he plowed on ahead.

You’d be irritated as well if you were in his place.

An odd noise floated to your ears and you paused, head tilting to try to hear it better. Ryan stopped, body frozen with his head turned to the side and waited. At first, you couldn’t figure out what it was, but then Ryan was shoving you towards the bushes on the side of the road. “Go, go!” he whispered, stumbling behind you. You realized what the noise was quickly as you eased into the bushes and made room for the larger man. It was other people. The feeling of dread and suspicion that you had felt when you first met Ryan floated to the surface and you clutched the bat tightly and attempted to curl even further in on yourself as you peered through the foliage. Ryan removed his red hat, tucking it into his jacket and pulling up his hood to cover his blonde hair. You pulled up your hood, hoping that it would blend you further into the bushes around you.

The noise must’ve carried quite far, you counted at least ten minutes on your watch before anyone came into view.

There were eight people, varying heights, and strengths. Some looked like the traditional zombie survivalists while others looked like the cliché humans who became twisted and lost their humanity during the war. You wanted to point that out to Ryan, but when you opened your mouth he shot you a look that made your mouth click shut with a quiet click. If he didn’t trust them immediately, you wouldn’t either. He apologized for trying to kill you nearly immediately after he realized that you were a human, and yet he was hiding from the people slowly sauntering past.

You quickly figured out why.

The group stopped just up the road, one of them swung a rifle and rested it on his shoulder as another one bent down to inspect a body that was fairly fresh.

“Are they military?” you whispered into Ryan’s ear as softly as you could, he shook his head. “The guns?”

Average citizens had been stripped of their right to carry arms unless they were part of the military. The government hadn’t wanted a revolt to happen, and putting guns into the hands of citizens who were upset that their government was ruining their country was a bad idea. Sure, they could find weapons, but now that you were looking each one had some sort of gun or multiple. The chances of them finding that many were slim to none.

Ryan didn’t know, barely lifting a shoulder to indicate it without speaking. “Should we leave?”

“No,” he murmured, “They’d see us.”

You wanted to ask him if he ever stumbled upon another group of survivors before, and if they had reacted with violence instead of open arms. Instead, you watched the man looting the dead body. You couldn’t quite see everything, but the man tucked something quickly away and it caused an instant and negative reaction throughout the group. One of the women demanded what he had, and when he didn’t give it up people started shoving and their voices rose. You shrunk further into the ground, hoping that one of them wouldn’t sweep their gaze to check for zombies and spot us.

The man who was resting the rifle on his shoulder said something quietly and the man who had looted the corpse slowly reached into his pocket and brandished the stolen item. You knew it was instantly a cell phone, but the reaction of the group at seeing it was odd. They were all trying to grab it, but the man with the rifle, the man you assumed was the leader, snatched it from their grip and examined the object. There was a quiet conversation between the group and then the man placed the barrel of his rifle to the man’s chest and pulled the trigger. You stomach leapt into your throat. You wanted to run. To get out of there. The sound of the bullet ringing in your ears and throughout the air. Ryan had stiffened beside you, his hand clutching his axe with enough force to turn his knuckles white.

A sickening silence fell before you heard a murmur and then the entire group was roaring in laughter, people snatched what they could off their dead friend and continued on without a care in the world.

Neither of you moved. Frozen in place. The sound of the rifle replaying in your mind. The image of it replaying on the back of your eyelids every time you blinked. A constant torment.

It was you who moved first, a slight shift and a burst of pins and needles rolling up your leg as the blood returned to it. Ryan jumped when you shifted, and his eyes found yours, and in the silence, you saw the torment in his eyes. You could only imagine the horrors that were playing back in his mind. Memories pulled up from the dredges of his time on the front line by the unwelcome sound of a gun going off. You remembered seeing your friends lined up and shot for going against the war, you remembered seeing people rebelling against their captors and shot for their insubordination. Your fingers were shaking, but you reached over and took Ryan’s hand in yours.

The contact didn’t break the tension, but he drew you closer, dropping his head against your shoulder and letting out a shaking breath. Neither of you willing to get up and move just yet, the threat of the gun floating above your heads. “It’s okay,” you whispered to Ryan, your other hand lifting and resting on the top of his head, then you parroted his words from the other day, “You’re fine, I’m fine. We are fine.”

Both of you couldn’t break down right now, and you shouldered the responsibility of plowing through your own anxieties and shoving down your emotions to be there for Ryan. He needed it more than you, and you didn’t like silence. You rubbed his back, listening to his erratic breathing that slowly became even slower. His hand was clutching yours tight enough you were sure your fingertips were turning white, but you didn’t care. You pressed your cheek against the side of his head, breathing calmly. You repeated his words once again. “Those men are gone. You’re fine, I’m fine. We are fine.”

He took a deep breath before straightening up. “Thank you,” his fingers squeezed yours once more before releasing them. The bushes creaked and leaves sprung off as he slowly stood up. “We should continue on,” he advised, tucking his hat into a proper pocket before holding out his hand towards you. “In case they double back. We’ll stick close to the side of the road.”

“Where did they get weapons?” you asked, unable to stop yourself. You knew bringing up the situation was probably not what he needed, but you couldn’t just let it go. If they had weapons, other people surely could as well. If they were military…then you really wanted to find Ryan’s group to warn them against going to the Northern camp. If those who were supposed to create order were killing each other off the side of the road where was safe anymore? Ryan didn’t seem to slip into another panic attack, that was good at least.

“I’m not sure…I- they- there aren’t like weapon caches like in video games, at least that I know of. Or if there is they wouldn’t be here, but up north or down south. Closer to borders,” he adjusted his backpack before taking the lead again. You followed after him, his limp was less noticeable and you wondered if that was him concentrating on something other than the wound. “We need to avoid those assholes. We’ve come across others like them in the past, they didn’t have guns. Thank God. They were a lot less violent when they couldn’t shoot us from across the road.”

“This is just like every clichéd post-apocalyptic world,” you shake your head, “I had the slender hope that people would have come together and started rebuilding society as we knew it…instead, they do that?” you wave behind you, “Kill their friends, and think using guns is a good idea.”

“There are people who, to this day, think that the war was a good thing,” he pointed out to her, “People like that, who prey upon chaos. As long as we don’t become them, I think humanity has some hope. Don’t you think?”

His tone was as hopeful as you wanted to feel, but you were starting to get doubts about this camp. You squashed them down, kicking a rock off to the side and then. “As long as we don’t turn into murderers. I think we’ll be good.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he muttered, a bit of humor in his tone. “My aim is atrocious, I don’t think I could actually hit a real human.”

“You almost killed me,” you pointed out, allowing the conversation to flow away from the assholes and onto something more familiar. “Those Froot Loops, though? They’re super dead. They never knew what hit them.”

“If I had been using these, I probably would’ve been able to kill two boxes of cereal,” he patted his throwing knives, still attached to his hip.

“You should show me how to use those,” you pantomime throwing a knife and he chuckled. “I mean what if your hands are tied and I don’t have my trusty baseball bat?” you ask, patting the weapon. It was starting to dent and you’d need to find something better soon if you wanted to be able to defend yourself. Maybe you’d find another one or something better in another town.

“I can teach you a bit when we find a place to stay at night while we’re eating,” he suggested with a shrug, he pulled one out of the case, “They’re going to dull if we use them too much, though, so maybe we can find something else for you to fight with.”

“Good idea,” you grin, looking back at him. Your foot caught something, and you let out a squawk as you fell. You hit the ground, skinning up your palms and cracking your chin against the pavement. Ryan swore and helped you get up. “How do I look?” you mutter, tasting blood. You must’ve bitten your lip. Damn it. That was going to be a bitch for the next couple days.

Ryan wasn’t looking at you, however, his gaze on the floor. You look beside you and see exactly what he was talking about. A fresh corpse. Another one. You couldn’t tell what had killed him, but the blood was pooling around your feet and you realized belatedly that your knees were slick with blood. You immediately wiped your hands on your jacket, praying that you hadn’t gotten any of his blood on your cuts. You didn’t need to worry about cross contaminated blood.

“Maybe we should find a place to sleep now. I want as much distance between us and them as possible,” you murmur, idly wiping your hands on your shirt still.

“Agreed,” he murmured, and then took your arm, “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

You couldn’t stop wiping your hands off as he led you down a dirt side road. You forced the image of the dead bodies from your head, you had seen plenty over the years and you weren’t about to let these two bodies burn in your mind forever.


	9. Chapter IX

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for missing the last two upload schedules, I had to attend a funeral and then I forgot to upload on Sat. Woops

Your hands stung less now, freshly wrapped in gauze and disinfected. It was another time you were grateful to have another person to travel with you. If Ryan hadn’t been there you would’ve been able to wrap your hands, but it would’ve been harder, and taken longer. It took no longer than five minutes and then the two of you were off back on your way. Your lip split every goddamn few minutes if you had more water or chapstick you probably could’ve stopped the blood from seeping into your mouth.

It was frustrating.

Night came along, and after finding a spot to hunker down, Ryan pulled out his throwing knives. After a few tries, you got one to hit and actually stick, which made you cheer. You took the first watch, fiddling with one of the throwing knives for a while. Eventually, you switched shifts and you were out like a light. You had nightmares. Horrible nightmares. Ryan didn’t wake you up, and you forgot the dream within minutes of waking up. You still felt anxious when you woke up and got ready for the rest of the day. Ryan noticed that but didn’t comment. You thanked him silently, you didn’t want to have to explain that you were anxious about a dream you couldn’t remember.

“There’s a town ahead, we should stop and make some preparations there. See if we can gather more supplies, and I’d rather make sure that our friends from yesterday are as far away as possible,” Ryan explained over a granola bar. You attached your sleeping bag to the bottom of your backpack before your mind processed his sentence and you could form a response.

“Hopefully, we can find some more energy bars,” you yawned. “I forgot to grab some when we were still in the city.”

He smiled at you, and you returned it. Eager to forget the unease in your stomach, and his smile made it so easy to do that. He tucked the map away and then put his wrapper in his pocket. “We should get going before any zombies stumble on us.”

You were surprised that last night there was nothing that attacked the two of you, it was pitch black, but most zombies would stick close to the cities. There was no food they wanted to eat in the forest. He stood up, swinging his bag onto his back as he did. With a stretch, you followed suit and checked your watch. The battery had died half past four in the morning while you were asleep. For some reason…that fact just made your chest tighten even further but you took a deep breath and looked up at your companion. “Well, lead the way.”

“Depending on how big the town is, and how many of the zombies there are, we might be better splitting up,” Ryan suggested after the two of you reached the main road once again. “Staying in hearing distance of course, but I want to get in and get out as soon as we can. Until we meet up with the others staying too long in cities just sounds like a bad idea.”

“You think it’d be a good idea to split up?” your voice came out a bit more judgmental than you meant it to. “After what we saw yesterday? Those assholes might be lurking around and you want to be separated?”

His head turned to you, a slightly surprised look on his face. You bumped into him when he stopped moving. “I’d rather us be separated. If they spot one of us, we have a better chance of escaping if we’re separated then next to each other. If they see me, I can lead them away and you’ll be safe, and if they spot you, I can distract them and hopefully get us both out of there.”

“If we’re together, we can take other precautions and keep safe together,” you motioned between the two of you, “instead of you trying to play hero and getting us both killed.”

The surprised look grew, “I-I’m not trying to play hero-”

“That’s what it sounds like you’d be doing if those lunatics found us,” you accused, “we’re sticking together.”

He was quiet for what felt like forever until he exhaled softly. “We’ll do a sweep of the town if there’s no one there and little zombies, we’ll target key locations, split up but stay within hearing distance. Time isn’t something we’ve got to lose.”

You could hear a tone of desperation in his voice. He was thinking of his friends. The longer the two of you stuck in one spot, the longer he’d be separated from them. The greater the distance would grow if his group thought him dead and moved on without him. A tiny spike of guilt embedded in your mind and you reluctantly agreed with him. Which quickly found you combing through a pharmacy for anything that could be of use. As with most pharmacies, anything that was apparently useful was gone. Even vitamins were depleted, and you wouldn’t have even thought about grabbing vitamins during a zombie apocalypse until you were in the thick of one. Getting low on iron? Take some supplements to prevent weakness and everything else that comes with low iron.

Ryan was across the street in a tiny sports store, replacing weapons and seeing if they had any medical supplies. Braces, wraps, anything that would help ease a sprain or something else that could be debilitating during the apocalypse.

Your stomach was in a knot the entire time, wondering if Ryan was okay. Though you had to admit, there had been no signs of any living humans in the town when the two of you did a quick sweep. No freshly killed zombies, no congregated zombies in a section of town which would’ve indicated where the zombies had last seen people. Nothing. You didn’t know the last time you were excited about a deserted town.

As you finished up in the pharmacy, you checked your watch once more and sighed; you unclipped it and placed it on the counter. There was no use to wearing it if you’d just keep looking down to see a broken watch. That would just spur more hateful thoughts in your head and you didn’t want to deal with that bullshit right now. With a deep breath, you glanced out the window and saw Ryan emerging from the sports store with a compound bow and a quiver full of arrows. He grinned at you and held it up.

“Is your name secretly Robin?” you called stuff the last bit of medicinal supplies into the first aid kit and tucked that into your bag. When you looked back at him, he was staring down the road, completely still. When you opened your mouth, he gave the tiniest little shake of his head.

You took a step and he shook his head again.

You took another step and he took a step backward.

Then you heard it.

The horrible screech of zombies locked on a target. Ryan locked eyes with you and then judged the distance between your store and him. You gestured to the sports store and his jaw clenched. If they were locked onto him, he needed to get the hell out of there as soon as he could. With another moment of hesitation, he slipped slowly back into the sports store.

You quickly headed towards the back of the store, slipping out through the back employee's entrance. You could hear the zombies screeching and yelling and you leaned against the concrete of the building. The dark of the alley was terrifying, but you took a deep breath and reminded yourself that you had survived alone before. You could again. You crept against the wall, choosing each step carefully and quietly. There were no roof access points in the alleyway you were in, and when you got to the end, it was nothing but a chain link fence topped with barb wire and a gate with a thick chain lock. You tossed your bag into the dumpster before climbing in after it.

The stench was awful, but you closed the top and huddled on the bottom by your bag.

You wished you had your watch so you knew how long you sat there for before you heard something even more spine-chilling than the zombie hordes screaming.

The screams of a man.

You jumped, hand reaching for the lid of the dumpster, but when the screams were accompanied with a spray of rifle fire, you froze. No. It wasn’t Ryan. The assholes from before had caught up with them and stumbled into a horde. They weren’t shooting at Ryan; they were shooting the zombies, thus drawing in more of the creatures and causing a bigger horde. Ryan most likely found a similar hiding spot and he’d hole up for the night. That was the plan if you two did end up getting separated. You remembered distinctly Ryan pointing out a nice house in the residential area, which was where he had wanted to stay the night if you two had to stay the night for whatever reason. It was also where you suggested you’d meet up if you got separated for whatever reason.

You stayed rooted to your spot for hours, and when the small trail of light started to dim, you slowly lifted the lid and scanned the area a few times before you pushed the lid up enough to toss your bag to the floor and follow it out.

Your heart was beating so fast in your chest as you headed towards the other end of the alley. The street that had been relatively cleared of bodies was now littered with zombies and human corpses alike. You looted the first few you came across, finding nothing of importance. You paused patting down one of the human corpses. It was the asshole who had shot the man back on the road. You weren’t surprised to find him there. You were surprised to find he had nothing of importance on him. Nothing more than a weapon, some bullets, and a granola bar.

If he didn’t have anything on him…was there a camp nearby with more? You didn’t want to stick around the corpse if there was more coming in response to the firefight and the horde.

You headed towards the residential area before something red caught your eye. Your head whipped towards it before you could process why it was important to you.

Your heart stopped, and you hurried over. Ryan’s hat. You scooped it up.

“Ryan?” you called out, ignoring your instinct to keep quiet. “Ryan! Ryan!” your voice rose again, “Where are you!”

You heard the confused grunt of a zombie, and you felt like you got punched in the gut. You couldn’t die. Not yet. He was still alive. Just because you found his hat didn’t mean anything. Yeah, he’d be at the house. You took off in a dead run towards the house. Praying to every deity under the sun that he had just lost his hat and he was there. He had to be.

The house came quickly into view, and you threw caution to the wind, smashing the window beside the door and unlocking it. You barely felt the glass dig into your skin and tear as you reached through. You remembered to shut the door behind you and called out again. When silence met you, you called out again, and again, and again. Darting from room to room your heart clenched tighter and tighter until you threw open the door to the last room and found it empty. You caught yourself on the door frame, staring blankly into the room, your legs gave out.

You were alone.


	10. Chapter X

You curled up in a bedroom for the night, barely getting any sleep, clutching the hat to your chest. The night was cold and quiet. It was so strange. You had spent so long being alone, you should be used to this. Instead, you kept jumping when the house creaked and doing constant sweeps of the house. Just in case Ryan had shown up in the middle of the night and was hiding somewhere else. Nothing. All night long you worried. If he was laying somewhere hurt, you’d never forgive yourself for allowing him to split the two of you up. You should’ve run across the street to him. His damn foot was hurt. He couldn’t run as fast. What if a zombie had gotten him? What if one of those assholes had accidentally shot him in their frenzy?

The moment the sun rose above the horizon, you were out of the house. Your chest was tight as you combed through the small town. Going back to where you had last seen him, you traced the steps he took that you could remember and then looked around the areas to see if you could somehow track him. You went back to where his hat had been dropped. Nothing. You clutched the hat tighter. Without a body, you couldn’t assume that he was dead. So, you went back to the house and you stayed a full two days.

He didn’t come back.

You woke on the third day, looking at your backpack with such a bone-aching loneliness.

Maybe…maybe he thought you had died? Maybe he had moved on to find his friends. No matter what the reason he was gone, you couldn’t stay there any longer. You tied your hair back and then pulled the red cap on top. With a sense of guilt and sadness, you gathered your supplies and headed on. Leaving the town felt like the absolute worse idea you ever had, but you needed to. If he had been killed either by other survivors or by zombies, you wanted… no, you needed to tell his friends. They deserved to know.

It was odd, walking along the path without someone to talk to. He had become such a part of your life in the past week that it felt horrible without him there. Your chest ached.

By nightfall, you had made it to the next town over. You scoped out a fairly safe looking house and broke into it. You listened for anything within but heard nothing. After checking the area for any curious zombies you entered. All you wanted to do was curl up and cry, but you needed to stay strong. You couldn’t break down now.

A hand clamped over your mouth and yanked you backward. You screamed into the hand, which elicited a hush from a woman. It didn’t matter if you attracted zombies. You were terrified. Thrashing, you managed to slam an elbow into the man’s stomach and break free from his grip. Lunging towards the door, a woman with brown and faded red hair jumped in front of you, hands up in a calming motion. One of her hands went to her mouth and hushed you again.

“You’ll attract zombies!” she warned urgently, “Please!”

Your eyes flicked down to the baseball bat that fell on the floor. Would you be able to grab it before they did anything? They didn’t look like that other group. No guns. That was good. The woman had obviously once dyed her hair red, but since the end of the world it had grown out and faded. It was braided. The man had long curly hair, which he had pushed back with a bandana, he was muscular and had a couple different tattoos on his arms. Neither of them had a lot of gear with them. Was this their base? Had you unwittingly stumbled in?

There was a grunt of a zombie, and the three of you instantly crouched down, looking around at the windows. The male waved for the two of you to follow and led you upstairs. There, the three of you hunkered down in a room, staying completely quiet for a good half hour before someone dared to speak. It was the woman, she gestured towards you.

“What’s your name?” she asked, conversationally.

There was no real reason to keep that to yourself, so you offered it up freely. “You?”

“Lindsay, this is my husband, Michael,” she gestured to the male sitting beside her. “Where are you heading?”

“Uh…you jumped me…why should I tell you?” you asked, ignoring the tension in your voice. They had a similar feeling as Ryan but after just…losing him, you didn’t want to immediately cling to the first people you met. You didn’t even know if they were just keeping you alive until the night was over. Zombies were attracted to dead bodies and would swarm the moment they smelled it trapping the two of them in the house. Making conversation was only keeping the tension down slightly, and you had a feeling that it would just increase if the conversation shifted too off track.

“We were here first,” Michael snapped, “Who just bursts into a place without checking it out first?”

“Michael,” Lindsay warned, and he leaned back against the wall. “We ‘jumped’,” she used air quotes, “you because if you had seen us first, we didn’t know if you’d attack, and we didn’t want you to scream and attract zombies. Better to have the upper hand than regret it later.”

You had to admit that she was right, you didn’t like it, but she was right.

“Up north,” you answered reluctantly, “I came from the city.”

That piqued both of their interests. They exchanged a look and then Lindsay looked back at you. She gestured to your head, “that hat…where did you get it?”

You reached up and touched the brim of the hat, tugging it further down your head. “Why does that matter?”

“Tell her,” Michael demanded, keeping his voice low. He wasn’t looking at you. His hands were in fists and his knuckles were turning white. “Did you loot someone? Steal it? Kill someone?”

Ryan’s face flashed in your mind, his smile, warm eyes. You clenched your fists. “Why does it matter?”

He sat up, and Lindsay placed a hand quickly on his leg. “It’s just that…a good friend of ours had a hat very similar to that. We haven’t seen him in more than a week. If…he has sandy blonde hair, about six feet tall, he had a dark blue hoodie when we last saw him. The name is Ryan if you talked to him.”

Your heart caught in your throat. They had been so close. Literally in the next town. If the two of you just hadn’t separated…he’d be here.

You started crying before you could stop yourself. Covering your mouth, you pulled your knees up to your chest. The two of them exchanged worried, horrified looks. Lindsay moved across the room to you and put a hand on your knee. “What happened to him? Is he okay?”

“He’s not okay! She wouldn’t be crying if he was okay!”

You swallowed thickly, pushing through the tears. “I…we met in the city…we grouped up to escape a horde. When we got to where you guys were supposed to be, you had moved on…” you wiped at your face. They needed to know. Everything. Even if they didn’t accept you or want you to go, you wanted to tell them. If they believed you, that would be another thing. You would just have to trust that they would take you at your word. You told them everything, especially about the assholes who you assumed were all dead in the other town. You hadn’t seen many fresh corpses when you were looking for Ryan, and you checked each and everyone just in case it was him. None of them had been. You saw too much death that day.

Lindsay covered her mouth and looked over at her husband. He said nothing, just punched his thigh, tears in his eyes. “You didn’t find a body?” he asked, voice thick. You shook your head.

“I stayed for two days where we were supposed to regroup if we got separated,” you told them, “he didn’t come.”

Michael ran his hands up and down his thighs. For a moment neither of them said anything, Michael exhaled heavily. “Ryan is totally the kind of guy to do what you said and if he invited you to join the group? I’m not about to say no, as long as you can help out the group. We’ll get the others, and head back to the town. Maybe you missed something. Nobody means he’s not dead.”

“I was going to school to become a pharmacist, I know about medicines. I know CPR and First Aid,” you offered, and they both look impressed. “He could’ve thought I died and thought the town was too dangerous to go back to.”

“I agree with her, if he thinks she died…then he might have already headed north. With luck, he’s already found the others at the camp,” Lindsay said, but you heard the doubt in her voice. You didn’t know who she was trying to convince. Herself, you, her husband, or the entire group. Either way, you were grateful for her optimism, even if it wasn’t a hundred percent truthful. You would trust them for now, not completely, but with a healthy amount of skepticism. There wasn’t that same amount of trust you had with Ryan, but these people knew him. You remembered him saying that even though there were arguments, he wouldn’t trade them for anything. If they were anything like him? You would learn to trust them, just like you had learnt to trust Ryan.

Thinking of Ryan just made you sad again. Thinking about all the possible scenarios of where he could be. Would you guys end up finding him? You felt a bit of nausea at the thought of returning and finding his body now. The zombies would’ve gotten to him. You nearly started to cry again, but you bit your lip. You didn’t want to cry in front of strangers. They knew him better than you did, and you felt almost guilty for crying over their friend.

The three of you divvied up the night watch, you offered to take the first and they were grateful for that. You sat beneath the window as they took place on the bed. You could see the stars twinkling high above through the sliver of the window. One thing you remembered from the pre-apocalypse was hearing about apocalyptic situations where the character would see nature reclaiming the world around them or the sky, and they would see and revel in its beauty and use it to justify their ideologies on global warming or nuclear war. How humanity was just destroying itself. You felt yourself agreeing with that but at the same time?

Yeah, the sky was beautiful. Yes, you thought it was cool when you saw a crack in the concrete with flowers poking through. However, you would trade it all in an instant if you could go back to the way it was before the war. To that simple innocence. You thought you were stressed before, worrying about grades and making sure you could afford at the very least ramen and rent. Now, your stresses of the past seemed so simple that you almost regretted complaining about them then.

You never had to worry about whether or not you had left a friend behind to die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm such a bad fanfic writer. RIPERINO. Oh well, I'm back to writing this, and I should have it all written out in the next couple weeks so I can just post once a week! I was going to upload this tomorrow, but I know I'll forget and then it'll be even longer to wait for an update. So! Thanks for reading and sticking with the story if you've done so!


	11. Chapter XI

Lindsay told you that it would take two days to travel back to the group. Even though you were travelling with them, you didn’t feel like you were a part of their group, just someone tagging along. They walked ahead, talking to each other occasionally. Lindsay would sometimes attempt to bring you into the conversation, but it would fall flat after a while. It wasn’t that you didn’t like either of them, it was more…you just missed Ryan’s companionship, and you felt an enormous amount of guilt for not finding him. Lindsay offered you a sympathetic look after her last attempt at getting you to hold a conversation for more than five minutes.

You took off the hat to adjust your ponytail and glanced up at the sky. “Where are we camping tonight?” you asked, there was probably an hour or so until the sun set completely. The two stopped walking, checking the time on Michael’s watch.

“If any of those assholes survived, we should get off the road and further into the forest,” he suggested, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder. “No zombs come out to the forest.”

Lindsay agreed, and you allowed them to lead you off the road. You watched your feet, taking out the flashlight as the forest grew darker and darker. Every time you glimpsed your shoes, you remembered you and Ryan procuring them from the store.

About halfway through the forest, you passed something that glinted under the light of the flashlight. You paused, bending down and picking the object up. It was a throwing knife, there was a bit of blood at the edge of the knife but overall was in pretty good shape. Lindsay and Michael noticed then that you had stopped walking. You immediately started shining the light around the area, trying to find anything else. Anything at all.

“What are you doing?” Michael asked, sounding slightly annoyed at the halt.

You showed them the knife, “It’s Ryan’s!” you said, then lowered it slightly. “You guys came from the south, right?” you asked them. They looked at each other and realization dawned on their face. Ryan had not been this far north yet. How could a knife of his be this far north, if he hadn’t been?

“You’re shitting me,” Michael blurted out and hurried back over. His flashlight joining the search for any signs. Lindsay pointed out some footprints excitedly, heading further into the forest. The three of you followed them, being sure to keep a lookout for anything else. Objects, signs, any footprints that trailed off. Your heartbeat quickening the further and further you followed them. Maybe Ryan did escape and think you were dead, maybe he had the same idea the three of you had on his journey north? Sure, he might not be where you guys end up, but the knife was proof enough to you that he was still alive.

It was Lindsay who noticed it first and grabbed her husband, forcing him to stop. The forest was dark already, and you could see a campfire flickering ahead. You didn’t hurry on forwards because you noticed the rest of the scene. A firepit sat outside a cabin, the cabin covered with metal, spikes, and red spray paint with words telling people to fuck off. A few men were sitting around the fire, eating some meat. Voices quietly started filtering to you.

“Flashlights,” Michael whispered, and the three of you instantly clicked off the beams of light.

There was doubt in your mind now. Was Ryan here? Or had his corpse just been looted by one of these assholes?

Michael and Lindsay seemed to both have the same thought, crouching down behind some bushes. You joined them, taking off Ryan’s hat and tucking the brim into the waistline of your pants. “He could be in there, maybe they took him hostage,” Lindsay suggested, “You’ve heard some of the rumors of forced labour camps.”

“What if they notice us before we can confirm he’s in there?” Michael retorted, “What if he’s not and they just stole his shit? If these are the same assholes as she says, then they’ve got guns. We don’t. We’re fucked if they notice.”

“What if he is in there?” you shot back, your voice barely a whisper. “What if he’s in there and we just leave him?”

The two of them looked at each other, weighing the options. Whatever passed between them ended up with Michael shaking his head and making a frustrated noise which blended in with, “Okay! Fine! We’ll scope the place out. We see him? We figure out how to get him out. He’s not there? We get the fuck out before those assholes notice. Lindsay, you stay here and keep watch.”

“Why do I have to stay?” she asked quietly.

“Two of us moving around is quieter, and if they notice? I’ll distract them so you two can get the hell out,” you suggested, feeling suddenly like you were channeling Ryan and his selfless self-sacrificing.  Neither of them argued with that. You could easily go alone, which would be even safer for the three of you, but you had a feeling that Michael didn’t fully trust you.

It took longer to sneak through the forest than you thought it would. Having to crouch, constantly keep your eyes on the people outside, and having to give the cabin a wide berth as you circled around it was time-consuming. Having to do it in the dead of night was even worse. Every step either of you took, you had to double check you weren’t about to step on a dry stick. A simple crack of a stick at night was like a gunshot. Thankfully, neither of you broke the calm of the darkness. You heard the far-off cries of coyotes and heard the conversation lull around the front of the cabin for a moment before it resumed.

There were traps the closer the two of you got to the cabin as well. Strings with bells on them mostly. They were easy to step over and avoid. Michael stopped you from stepping into a bear trap, yanking you back just before your foot pressed on the pressure plate. Your heart was thumping so heavily in your chest that you felt like you were going to have a heart attack. He took the lead after that, using a stick to gently lead the way. If it hit something hard in the brush, he’d find a new path. It was slow and agonizing, but as he looked for traps, you kept an eye out for anyone.

The assholes were so sure of their safety, none of them had someone check the perimeter the entire time the two of you were making your way closer.

Most of the cabin windows were boarded up fairly well. It wasn’t until the third window you guys peered into that you saw the inside for the first time. It was a dingy little one-room cabin. There were five sleeping bags on one side of the room, the side closest to the window. On the far side, you saw Ryan.

Your heart stopped for a second and you dug your fingers into the windowsill. You felt slivers embed into your skin and pulled your hand away slowly. There were two guys talking to him. He had his hands bound behind his back, his supplies were off to the side. His bag empty and his weapons were tossed onto what you assumed as a pile of weapons these assholes had been collecting. You searched for any sign that he was seriously injured, but you couldn’t tell. His face was bruised, one eye was swollen shut, and there was dried blood, or what you assumed was dried blood, under his nose. It was fairly dark in the cabin, they had a lantern set up which provided a good deal of light, but his face was still cast in a shadow.

Michael cursed quietly, and then pulled on your arm. You didn’t move at first, and their voices filtered out through the broken window.

“I don’t know where they are,” Ryan coughed out. “I couldn’t tell you anything even if I wanted to.”

“Better hurry up and figure it out, guy because we leave in four days, and we’re not taking you with us or letting you leave,” one of the men said.

Another tug, this time sharper. You pulled your attention away from Ryan, and Michael jerked his chin back to the woods. You couldn’t talk to him, but you took one more look at Ryan. At least he was alive.

The two of you crept back all the way to Lindsay and then headed further away from the cabin. You could see the distant fire, but you couldn’t even hear their laughter anymore. Your small group set up a small camp and no one even bothered risking a fire even though it was a cold night. Michael relayed what the two of you had found over granola bars and canned ravioli. When he finished, Lindsay swore. “Four days? That gives us plenty of time, these guys are idiots.”

You had to agree. Who stuck around that long in an area, especially if you had kidnapped someone who you assumed had people who would notice them missing?

“There are traps all around the perimeter. Five guys in total. They don’t seem all that worried about someone actually being able to sneak up on them,” Michael explained, “If we check out their routine, we can break in and get Ryan and leave.”

“You think it’ll be that simple?” you asked, keeping your voice down. “I think we should have a bit more of a plan.”

“Well, obviously we’ll make a plan,” Michael retorted. “I’m not rushing in there in the hopes that they stick to a routine.”

“Those traps,” Lindsay said, “We could set off a bunch of them, get the assholes to come run out to see what tripped them.”

“If they all come running out?” Michael asked, “One person might not notice us in the forest or nearby, but I’m sure five people would.”

“If they’re stupid they’ll all come rushing out. If they’re smart, they’ll send a few people to check. Hopefully two. Then we can knock them out, tie them up, and decrease the number of people we have to worry about,” you said, taking a sip of water. Things could always go wrong, but you wanted a plan, at least you could go into it thinking everything would go smoothly.

“How good are you at fighting?” Michael asked you, and you shrugged a shoulder.

“Not great? I can take zombies out, but I don’t know about humans.”

“So, you will be tasked with setting off the traps and then hiding. Lindsay and I will if only a few people come to investigate, knock them out and take their weapons,” Michael said, and then drew a crude looking cabin in the dirt. Lindsay turned a flashlight on, making sure to aim it straight down so it only illuminated the dirt. You made sure to sit between the beam of light and the cabin as well. Minimizing the chance that the men back there noticed anything. You and Michael mapped out where all the traps you remembered were.  From there, the three of you debated, argued, and planned until you were all satisfied with the plan to break your friend out of the cabin. You all agreed it would be best to watch for two days and then attack on the third.

Over the next two days, you watched and made mental notes. Who seemed to stick with who. What their routines were. There were more than five men, you guys discovered the next night. A group had gone off for a raid and came back, upping the group to ten people. On the second day, thankfully, another five people left for a raid as well.  Most of the intel you guys had gotten the previous day was invalid since it was a new group.  They functioned pretty much the same way.

The third night? You were struck by a blessing. As you, Michael, and Lindsay were setting up to start the plan, you heard someone yell that they gotten beer, followed by cheers. Michael suggested waiting another two hours to start the plan. A bunch of drunks would be easier to deal with than men with sharp focus.

Lindsay and Michael were hiding, ready to jump anyone who came around the back of the cabin to investigate the noise. You stood well back, before yanking on the string you had set up to set off the bells. They rattled loudly, and you heard the group of men quiet down, listening. Sure, their bells just went off, but that could’ve been just the wind. You tossed a few rocks, and finally one hit the bear trap. It snapped and you let out a blood-curdling scream, before yanking yourself up the tree that Lindsay had suggested the other day. You had made sure it was climbable and they could barely see you. None of the men would bother looking up, you were sure of it. If they did? You would drop down on them, and take them out.

You didn’t know if you could kill another person, but if they were trying to kill you?

Anyone could kill.

You clung to the branch and went as still as possible. You heard shouting, but stayed completely still. You saw Lindsay and Michael dragging two men behind some bushes, their hands were then tied to ropes. They darted back to their hiding spot. That left three people. Lindsay gestured a thumbs up to you and you started begging loudly, screaming for help. More shouting, and then Lindsay darted underneath your tree and gestured you to come down. You half climbed, half fell from your spot, hitting the ground with a sharp pain in your ankle.

“One more,” she said, “He went inside when he realized the first two weren’t coming back.”

You took a step, but you nearly fell to the floor. She placed a hand on your shoulder. “Stay here, we’ll get him out. Take care of your leg.”

She forced you to sit before hurrying back over to her husband. You wanted to go after them, to help out, but with your ankle, you would just hinder. They were more than capable.


	12. Chapter XII

You were just pulling your shoe back on over the ankle brace when Ryan burst through the foliage alongside his friends. You felt such relief at seeing his face, and he looked so shocked and positively delighted. He hurried over to you, but before either of you could say anything Michael jabbed a thumb behind him.

“We have to get the fuck out of here unless we want a bunch of assholes on our asses. Those guys will wake up, and they have more friends,” he said, and then pointed at you. “We’ll have to move as fast as we can. She fucked up her ankle.”

Ryan hauled you to your feet, and the four of you were on the way immediately. None of you put much faith in the group being able to track, but just in case, Michael led the way back to the road. Your ankle screamed in pain, but you ignored it, gritting your teeth and jogging alongside the others. Ryan a step behind you, urging you on when you started to slow. The further away the group got. The better. None of you would sleep that night, walking and jogging throughout the darkness. Jumping at every sound, and hiding out in the forest at the slightest indication there was other human life.

There was no way any of you wanted to continue walking during the day, exhausted from moving throughout the night. However, it was unspoken that you’d all keep moving as long as you were able to. Thankfully, that meant you guys came across the next small town two hours before sunset. The towns were getting further and further apart. Lindsay commented that the others were half a day’s walk away so, none of you had to be up at daybreak. You were so relieved when Ryan pointed out a house, and everyone agreed on it. After scoping it out, making sure it was empty, you all poured into the living room.

After second thought, the group relocated upstairs. You offered to take first watch, you needed to elevate your ankle and take some meds for the pain anyway, and you didn’t know if you could fall right asleep knowing that those assholes might be on your trail. Ryan offered to join you. Lindsay and Michael relocated to a separate bedroom, leaving you and Ryan alone across the hall.

You placed your backpack on the ground, feeling your back, ankle, and legs scream in relief. Ryan dropped his bag as well and then pulled you into the tightest hug you probably had ever felt. You found yourself clinging back, and then your body started shaking. Crying into his shoulder, his body began to quiver softly as well, and you pushed away. You laughed off your tears, wiping at them with your shirt.

He looked awful, his face bruised and bloody. You reached up and barely brushed your fingertips beside his eye. He flinched at that, and you apologized quietly. “You look awful,” you mutter. “Here,” you open up your bag and dig for a cloth and some water. He sat down on the bed and you poured some water on the cloth and handed it to him. Part of you wanted to help clean up his cuts, but you knew that he knew his pain tolerance the best. He carefully wiped the blood and dirt from his face, before realizing that you were still standing on your ankle and ushering you onto the bed.

After propping up your ankle, you began fussing over him again. Telling him to take some pills and cursing the lack of ice for his eye. If only you were further north and it was winter, maybe you could get an icicle and break it apart for ice. It was only wishful thinking, so you shoved the thoughts aside. Ryan stood up and dug through his bag. Most of his things were gone, you noticed. He was taking inventory. Eventually, he pulled out some clothes and placed them on the foot of the bed. You tugged his hat further down your head to be decent, but he came around to the side of the bed and lifted the brim to look at you.

“How’d you find them?” he asked, voice soft and surprised. “Did you know what happened to me?”

You shake your head, “I…I thought you were dead. I heard a scream, the gunfire, and I thought you got killed. I…” you swallowed thickly, “I found your hat,” you gestured weakly up, and then removed it and handed it back to him. “Here, by the way.”

He took the hat, but then just put it back on your head. “Nah, it looks better on you.”

That made your cheeks warm up, but thankfully he didn’t comment on it. You told him the story of how you met Lindsay and Michael, and how by chance you stumbled across his throwing knife. You gestured to your bag, remembering belatedly that you had kept it. He nodded along with the story. Once it was complete, you reached up and gently touched his cheek, just below the bruise, tilting your own head back and forth to look at the damage. He reached up and moved your hand up so it covered the bruise, “Your hands are cold,” he sighed almost happily.

“What happened?” you asked quietly, “Why did they hurt you like this?”

“When we got separated, I had to run to escape some zombies. I tripped and my hat fell off. I didn’t bother grabbing it since I heard the scream and the gunfire. I thought at first it was a male scream, but after a night of hiding out, I began to think…maybe it hadn’t been and that’s just what I was telling myself to make myself feel better. I went to go find you, but I stumbled into those assholes. They got the jump on me and started demanding I take them to my group. I couldn’t be alone, no one was alone. They figured out I was heading north, and they heard the rumors about the northern camp as well. They thought I knew where it was. They took me to the cabin, and they beat me to try to get me to talk,” he said, his good eye staring down at the bed. “If it wasn’t for you, and the Jones’ I would have been killed.”

“Next time, we stick together,” you urge, and his gaze rose to look at you. “I won’t let this happen again.”

“If we had stuck together, you would’ve just ended up in that cabin with me. Lindsay and Michael might’ve found us, but they probably wouldn’t have,” Ryan said, cynical. He sighed and released your hand. You let it drop on your stomach. He stood up and headed to the foot of the bed. “Let’s not argue about it. We’ve got to look forward. You’re going to meet the others tomorrow night,” he grinned, but then gave a flinch of pain. You asked him if he was okay and he nodded. “Squished my bruise.”

You pulled your hat back over your eyes as he started taking off his jacket. You waited until he plopped down on the bed beside you to lift the hat back up.

“So, you got your bow back?” you asked, looking over at the weapon by the door. “Would you rather be called Robin, Legolas, or Hawkeye?”

He shook his head, “I don’t know. I think I look more like Hawkeye than the others…but man, Legolas? Can’t beat that guy.”

You laughed softly, leaning back on your hands. The two of you fell into friendly conversation that didn’t have anything to do with the post-apocalyptic situation that was the outside world, talking about video games, your old jobs, and other topics of that nature. You figured out that everyone you were going to meet once worked with him, before the war. Lindsay and Michael apparently even met while working at the company. He didn’t ever say the company name, and you didn’t bother asking. It didn’t matter anymore that was in the past. This was now.

Eventually, Ryan got up to wake up Lindsay and Michael. When he returned, he closed the door. Then he paused, looking at the bed. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“Don’t be stupid,” you mutter, already half asleep. “You’ve been tied up on a dirt floor for the past week, get over here.”

He hesitated for a bit longer before walking around and lifting the blanket up. He untucked it from underneath you, you barely helped, the exhaustion making your limbs feel like fifty pounds each. You rolled onto your stomach and cuddled into the pillow. Ryan adjusted the blanket over you before finally getting into the bed beside you. A heartbeat passed, and then he rolled onto his side facing you. You could barely keep your eyes open, but you offered a tired smile at him.

“I missed you,” you whispered, feeling an odd intimacy between the two of you. Nothing about it was sexual or romantic really. It was just…the feeling of the blanket creating a little hollow space, the comfiness and warmth of the bed, plus the closeness. You felt at ease, so comfortable. He reached over, his hand curling around yours.

“I missed you too,” he whispered back.


	13. Chapter XIII

It was a very short walk to meet up with the others- just half a day, and you all agreed to take your time before heading out. After all, Ryan’s foot was just healing from the puncture, and your ankle was still sore to step on. In the end, the group didn’t depart until just after noon.There was a rush of excitement that you felt the moment that Ryan stepped through the small opening in the concrete wall. Everyone was on their feet and swarming around him, all reaching out to touch him, chatting, asking questions. Overall, it was overwhelming. Relief and anger mingled together in a sort of happy reunion. It was nearly too much for you. Still, you stood still and allow it to take its course, none of them had even noticed you yet. Michael and another male pushed a large metal dumpster back in front of the entrance, kicking the wheel brakes so it wouldn’t be as easily moved.

“Oh!” Ryan’s voice cut through the throng, he gestured towards you, “That’s her.”

Lindsay grabbed your shoulders and beamed at the others, “She’s the reason we even found Ryan in that cabin in the first place!”

You felt your cheeks heat up at all the eyes suddenly on you. Ryan immediately began the introductions. There was Geoff, Jack, Gavin, Jeremy, Meg, Trevor, Alfredo, and Caiti. Together with Michael, Lindsay, and Ryan, they had a group of eleven people. You wanted to curl up and disappear. While being around Ryan was soothing and comforting, being around eleven people after being around none? It was almost stifling. Instead, you lifted your hand slightly and called out a wide greeting.

Ryan immediately ushered you over to the fire pit set up in the centre of the small building. It had at one point been a receiving bay for a furniture store, which was amazing you soon found out. They had couches surrounding the fire, and had a few mattresses on the ground, bundles of plastic off to the side. If it wasn’t for the fact that there was promise of safety up north, you wondered if the group would decide just to stay here.

You practically melted into the couch, feeling exhaustion wearing on your bones. You felt yourself drifting in an out of consciousness, staring at the fire, until someone dropped heavily onto the couch beside you.

It was…Meg, you were pretty sure. She was petite with long brown hair, and brown eyes. She leaned towards you, quieting her voice to an almost stage-whisper, “That hat looks good on you.”

You felt your cheeks heat up and you adjusted it almost self-consciously. It hadn’t even really occurred to you how others would see it if you were wearing someone’s hat. Hell, it hadn’t occurred to you that other people would have opinions. You just hadn’t cared for so long about that sort of thing. Now around so many people…you still didn’t really, but there was that tiny ounce of almost pleasure in your chest at what it could’ve meant once upon a time.

“Thanks,” you stage-whisper back. She smiled and soon you found yourself mid-conversation about the war. Meg had been a cosplayer before the war, she had actually been in another part of the country when the war started. It had been incredibly difficult to get back to her home during it, and she had almost been conscripted but at that time they weren’t desperate enough to sign on a five one woman and by the time they were, she had gotten hit in the head and had seizures as a result of it so she couldn’t be trusted on the front lines. When the bombs hit, she and a huge amount of the others in the group were still in Austin. They went in search for any survivors, but survivors were hard to find.

Eventually, they found Geoff and Ryan. Then Jeremy and Jack found them, the two of them had left in the middle of the night during the fighting and hid from the government until the bomb. Everyone else hadn’t been conscripted just yet.

Ryan dropped down beside you, interrupting the conversation. He handed you a warm bowl of soup and you practically poured it straight down your throat. It had been forever since you had a hot meal, and it was delicious. Ryan chuckled at that and, as you shovelled the liquid gold into your mouth, struck up a conversation with Meg. Their conversation was vaguely…flirtatious, you noticed, or rather, it could be easily interpreted as flirting. You felt the tiniest twinge of jealousy that you immediately squashed down. You had no right to be jealous. Why would you even feel jealous?

The British man, Gavin, came over with two bowls of soup and handed one to Meg. He kissed her cheek before sitting down on the couch beside her. Any feelings of jealousy instantly vanished. Meg smiled brightly at him, “Thanks, boy,” she said happily, and then turned to you and gestured towards the man with her spoon.

“Gavin here was accused of being a spy for the British,” she said and rolled her eyes. “He was here on a work visa before the war started, and you know how they tried to kick out a bunch of people back to their countries if they were here on a visa but those countries didn’t want them back in case they were spies for America.”

“A bunch of people and I escaped one of the camps they had set up for foreigners part way through the way,“ Gavin added, “I hid out with a bunch of them until the bombs dropped.”

“Thank god he did,” Geoff piped up from across the fire pit. “When Ryan and I were healing from our wounds, I heard some nurses whispering about rumours that the military had started mass murder of those in the camps and those imprisoned for being anti-war.”

You kept your eyes on your soup when you spoke up, “And you guys are heading for a camp supposedly protected by the military?”

There was a pregnant silence, and then Geoff half-laughed, “When you put it that way, it sounds stupid.”

“I’d rather face the military than the zombies,” Jack said, speaking through his thick beard. “Why would the military set up a base for survivors and then hurt the people?”

You saw the appeal of the military safety, but the more people told you about how the military just went to shit and your own experiences with it…the more you had doubts. You did realize that they had been together for far longer than you had known of their existence, and they probably had heard of the camp long before that. The chances that they’d already debated and dissected the whole thing was high. Though, the fact that they had all quickly accepted you….it almost sat ill with you. Had they truly thought it all through already or were you just putting your own way of thinking onto other people?

You’d trust that they had thought it through already.

At least, you would trust that they did for now. When you were closer to the camp? You’d start asking questions again. For now, it was better to just nod and allow the conversation to turn.

Jack stoked the fire, sending a tumble of bright embers into the air. One landed on your knee and Ryan immediately patted out the fleck before it could burn your pants. His hand rested there for a moment as Caiti asked Ryan a question. Once he had answered, he realized where his hand was resting and he removed it a bit too fast to be casual. You felt the warmth of where his hand had been but dismissed it quickly as just being the ember.

The group was easy to distinguish their relationships, you could tell from only an hour of knowing them. Caiti and Jack were married, you could see wedding rings on their left hands. Meg and Gavin were together and were slowly melting together into a casual cuddle. You wondered if there was still a sense of PDA for any of them, or since they were always around other people for safety it just disappeared.

They all had a sense of deep friendship, all ‘arguements’ dissolved into nothing after they were had. No lingering bitterness even if a particular argument wasn’t truly resolved.

“So, what about you?” Caiti asked you after a lull in the conversation.

“What about me?” you asked, eyebrows coming together.

“What were you doing during the war? If that’s okay to ask.”

You explained, a very short synopsis of what had happened. Even shorter than the tale you told Ryan. Thankfully, they were all like-minded in the fact that none of them supported the war, even if some were forced to be part of it. You heard more about their stories as well, and you felt yourself relaxing on the couch more and more. Ryan was still perched on the arm, but he had leaned back with his elbow on the back of the couch. Your head kept brushing his arm whenever you shifted it to look at whoever was speaking. It felt nice, that tiny bit of connection.

“Wait!” Jeremy, the short muscular one, interrupted Ryan’s interpretation of your meeting  “So, you were alone when Ryan almost killed you?”

“Yeah, I’ve been alone since the bombs dropped,” you shrugged a shoulder, “Scared the shit out of me when this big ol’ jerk threw a tomahawk at my head.”

“Completely alone?” Jeremy asked again, almost in shock.

“Yes?” you suddenly felt self conscious, which was a weird feeling.

“Holy shit. She’s badass. I nearly shit my pants everytime I go out with only one other person, and I’m _with_ someone. How’d you survive?”

You reached up and adjusted the hat, just idle movements really as an excuse not to answer right away. “I just did what I had to? Barely slept, ate what I could, kept constantly moving, mapped out safe areas. It just became second nature, I guess.”

“She didn’t really speak too much when I first met her,” Ryan said, “her voice was really…rough? Didn’t always use full sentences either.”

“You make me sound like I was a Neanderthal or something like that,” you huff, but gave him a fake scowl to let him know that you were just teasing him. He laughed.

“So, are you coming with us?” Geoff asked as the last of the paper bowls were tossed into the fire to dispose of them. “To the camp.”

“I did promise her that we’d take her with us,” Ryan piped up, his tone borderline defensive.

“If it’s no issue,” you hurried to say, you did your whole ‘I was in school to become a pharmacist’ spiel and Geoff waved a hand.

“Well, you’re more useful than most,” he shot a pointed look at Gavin.

“Oy!” he retorted, voice raising slightly.

“Ahhh, I’m just kidding,” Geoff flopped his hands towards Gavin in a dismissive gesture. “You’re welcome to come.”

You smiled and thanked him. “I’m just glad to finally be talking to other people,” you said, and Ryan sat up, a fake offended look on his face. You tossed your hands up, “Not that your company wasn’t thrilling!”

“Uhuh! I see how it is!” he said dramatically, “Pushed aside like chopped liver!”

The group instantly ganged up on Ryan, teasing him mercilessly on being a shit companion. You laughed along with them and the conversation eventually relented with compliments towards Ryan. Including a ‘salt of the earth. Love him.’ From Geoff.

Jack stood up at the end of it and clapped his hands together lightly. “Okay, who wants to be on night shift first.”

Ryan leaned close to you, “We don’t all take night shifts every night. It’s usually four people a night in groups of two, they might change it now that you’re here.”

They did. Geoff and Jack worked out a new rotation as you sat there. It’d be six people a night instead, still in groups of two. Geoff explained to you that the typical sleep allowance was nine hours, or until everyone woke up whichever happened first. With three groups, people would only have to sacrifice three hours of sleep every two nights instead of four and a half hours. Not that much, but at the same time so much.

It was Geoff and Jeremy on the first watch, Jack and Caiti on second, and then Alfredo and Trevor on the morning shift. When you didn’t get chosen you instantly offered to take someone’s place. It was Jeremy who spoke up.

“You said it yourself, you barely slept when you were alone. Then, what, slept for maybe four hours every night when you and Ryan were travelling. The same or a bit more sleep when you were with Lindsay and Michael. We’ve been doing these rotations for so long. I don’t think any of us would complain if you didn’t take a shift tonight. You need your sleep, and you’re injured, so? You sleep.”

You went to argue but Ryan clapped you on the shoulder. “Let’s go grab one of the good mattresses.”

Gavin grabbed Meg’s arm and pulled her to her feet. “Not if we get it first!”

Before you and Meg moved, Ryan and Gavin raced over to the mattresses. The group laughed at their antics, especially as Gavin jumped onto a mattress, only to have Ryan land completely on top of him a second later. Gavin let out a squeak and Meg shook her head. “That’s not even the bed you like!”

Ryan ended up shoving Gavin off the mattress and flopping onto his back in a starfish-like shape. He sighed happily.

Everyone besides Geoff and Jeremy headed to the mattresses, and the joviality faded as they all relaxed into their chosen mattresses. Ragity blankets were doled out by Lindsay, and Ryan happily took one as you kicked off your boots. It was second nature to flop down beside Ryan. He draped the blanket over both of you before he relaxed as well.

His face looked worse than it had yesterday, it was probably at the peak of the swelling. As the whispers faded into silence and left the room with only the crackling of the fire and the occasional murmur from Jack or Geoff, you reached over at gently touched the edge of Ryan’s bruising. He jumped slightly at the touch but turned his head to look at you. Neither of you said anything, just stared at each other for a while, and then he rolled towards you. You dropped your hand, and his quickly found yours. In that quiet moment, you squeezed his hand and then shifted closer.

You felt your face heat up when his eyes travelled down your face to your lips and rested there for a moment before snapping back up to meet your eyes.

Shifting closer again, his hand left yours and you felt his fingertips brush your waist ever so hesitantly. You tuck your arm in and wiggle until your head was under his chin, and your body was so close to his if you twitched you’d be touching him. His hand dropped onto your waist and then slid up to you back. He closed the gap between the two of you, resting his chin on the top of your head. You fell asleep instantly.


	14. Chapter XIV

A few days went by since leaving the furniture store safe spot. Sure, it was a lot less comfortable sleeping at night, but you had gotten the best sleep you had in for the longest time. You were so relaxed, and in the middle of the wilderness, there weren’t many zombies. The further the group got away from the city, the fewer towns you passed. Fewer towns meant that there weren’t as many encounters with any zombies. Everyone was grateful for that, their attitudes were entirely different when they were in a town than when they were on the road between. Yes, everyone was still alert to any change in the ambient noise or odd movement, but they were relaxed. Joking, laughing, talking freely. It was nice. Especially since they never pressured you into the conversation.

Normally, Ryan would walk beside you, but he was up ahead in a deep conversation with Jack and Jeremy about something or another. You had fallen behind taking in nature and giving your ankle a bit of relief of not having to walk as fast as some of the others did.

You found yourself in a conversation with Geoff instead.

“There’s still a lot of areas in the city that have the gas,” you explained, offering up a few places you knew off by heart that had the toxic gas. “It only lingers in an area where the toxin is still in the soil or in barrels. I don’t see there being a high chance of it being everywhere though.”

“You were a prisoner during the war, right? You didn’t see the gas implemented?” Geoff asked, slightly leaning back as he looked at you. You shook your head.

“No, and I’m sort of glad. I mean, I’ve seen the results nearly every day since the bombs, but…” you shook your head. “What was it like?”

“I didn’t see it either,” he said, and then swiftly changed the conversation. You didn’t press for more information. If he didn’t see it, he didn’t. You couldn’t change that. If he simply didn’t want to talk about it, well it wasn’t your place to force him to. You weren’t his best friend or anything. It hadn’t even been a week since you met him, and you could count the number of one-on-one interactions you had with the older man on one hand. Normally when you started to talk to someone, another person would chime in and soon there was a group all involved in the conversation. You hadn’t had a lot of time to talk to Ryan yet either, sadly. Sure, you talked to him plenty of times on the walk but someone else would slip into the conversation. Not that you minded. They were all very friendly people.

You just wished that you had time when it was just you and Ryan that wasn’t when you were sleeping next to each other. After that night on the mattress, the two of you hadn’t gotten that close while sleeping. Stuck in individual sleeping bags prohibited close contact. Then it was a random mash of different people every night. You had only had one night when you were teamed up with Ryan for the night shift. Other than that, you had a shift with Caiti one night, who was an absolute delight, and Trevor another.

“Hey!” Lindsay called out, “I hear a river!”

The conversations stopped and for a moment, you heard nothing but the normal sounds of a summer day. Chirping birds, the call of chipmunks, the trees creaking in the wind. Then, in a lull of the noise, you heard the most beautiful sound.

The river.

Everyone immediately spread out to find the source of the noise, and it didn’t take long.

Soon, everyone was dumping their gear at the water’s edge and wading into the water dressed in nothing but underwear.

It.

Was.

Bliss.

For the first time in ages, you felt clean. Your skin looked healthy and it’s normal colour. The stench that you were sure was clinging to your body must’ve diminished. Everyone was absolutely ecstatic by the fresh water. Sure, it was cold, and you felt fish slap against your leg occasionally as they swam down the river, but it was incredibly refreshing. Jeremy tackled Gavin into the water, and soon a full out chicken fight was happening. Gavin was on Jeremy’s shoulders, and Lindsay was on Michael’s. Yes, the rocks on the bottom of the river could scrape them all to shit, and probably would hurt like a bitch when one pushed the other down, but did any of them care?

No.

Ryan and Geoff were the only ones who stayed out of the water at first. Eventually, you and Caiti waded out of the water and joined the two of them. Caiti lent you a comb once she was finished with it, and you spent a good half an hour just going through your hair until there were absolutely no tangles.

Once you finished combing your hair, Ryan went to join the others, deciding since there were people to keep an eye out now, that he could wash up as well. You got dressed again and wrung the last bit of water you could out of your hair before sitting on the rock beside Geoff. Caiti moved to the river bank to watch the others and contribute to their laughing antics.

Ryan removed his shirt, and you saw his acid burn in full for the first time.

It was all over his chest and upper arms. The burns curled around his back in tendrils but left a majority of it smooth. They were completely healed but still looked raw and angry. The others didn’t seem to notice the burns at all when he joined them, and it left you feeling guilty for staring. You immediately averted your eyes to the rocks at your feet. You nudged one lightly and Geoff leaned back.

“That was a fucked up day,” Geoff muttered, his voice quiet. You never really heard Geoff…quiet. Even when he was being quiet out of necessity he still seemed boisterous in a way. This Geoff? This was a different kind of quiet. “We were in our barracks when it was attacked. The other side had never gotten that far into the country before, and it was a small group. They took out a huge portion of the barracks before anyone noticed. That’s what the military gets for conscripting people and then not training them. Ryan and I, we were grabbing out gear when the group burst into the room we were in. We managed to take out all of them, I was ex-army before the war. No one else entered right away after we took the guys out, so I moved forward to check the hallway. This asshole swings into the room with this…” he waved his hands vaguely, “thing. It was the same design as a flamethrower, but just without the fire part. I turned around because I thought it was a flamethrower, but it wasn’t. It was full of acid. Got it straight to my back. Ryan was further away and had time to protect his face. If he didn’t, he might’ve died or been seriously disfigured.”

You couldn’t find any words to say. In the silence, he looked over at you, and then lifted the back of his shirt slightly. His scar was more twisted and angry looking than Ryan’s. “Skin grafts all over my back. Another soldier came in and shot the asshole, and we were immediately sent to the hospital via helicopter further inland. The higher-ups wanted us back the moment our skin was ninety percent healed, but…shit went sideways, and now here we are. I’m just glad we both survived that.”

You glanced over at Ryan, his skin was lighter without the thin layer of dust and dirt. His facial swelling had gone down and now it was just a mash of purple, green, and yellow bruising as it slowly healed.

It was completely out of character when you looked over at him and said, “Thank you…for defending our country.”

He snorted and looked at you, his face asking if you really just said that. “I helped destroy it. If I defended it, we would’ve never met. I’d be sitting in a room with six of these assholes playing GTA or Minecraft for a living. Instead? We’re out in the middle of the wilderness fighting for our lives.”

You were silent, you didn’t know if you insulted him or not.

He patted your knee, “The people who were truly defending our country were the people who opposed the war in the first place. You and people like you did more to stop the war than I ever did.”

You opened your mouth to say how that wasn’t true. How no matter how hard you and your friends and family, and millions of people like you, fought, the war still happened. Billions of people still died from the war and millions more died in the aftermath. There was no telling how many humans even existed on Earth anymore.

He didn’t let you say anything, instead, standing up and stretching. “I would’ve felt better to have opposed the war and died. I should've fought my country instead of fighting in a losing war that fucked the entire planet up…and I love this damn country. I wanted to fight for it when the war first started, I didn’t want the war to happen, but since it did I didn’t want to just sit aside and let the world go to shit. Now? I regret ever thinking that way.”

“You can’t change the past,” you grabbed his arm before he walked away. “Don’t let it eat away at you.”

“It already has,” he said, his tone joking. “Can't-do any more damage.”

You couldn’t help but sigh and shake your head. He laughed and then said he was going to go and get cleaned up. As he walked away, you felt a twinge of guilt. Should you have fought harder against the war? Consequences be damned? Sure, you had been tossed into a conversion camp, but you knew people who had been killed because they were so adamant to stop the war. They truly protested it, they got right in the governments faced. You hadn’t been that bold.

It might not have mattered if one more person had done it, you might’ve just been added to the rest of the body count from the war.

However, if everyone had just been brave enough…maybe…just maybe the war wouldn’t have happened.


	15. Chapter XV

Things were going amazingly, according to Geoff. The group was making fast progress. You could tell the others had such high hopes for the camp. You didn’t want to rain on their parade by saying that it was a military camp. Even if they were super nice and offered protection and everything like that, it still was military. There would be strict rules, everyone would have duties, it wouldn’t be a casual homey place. They were all just glad to get somewhere safe, and you wanted that so badly as well. You hoped the camp was as good as promised.

Unfortunately, when the group crested a hill, an ill feeling settled into your stomach. A rush of memories assaulted your mind. Running, panicked screams, distant mushroom clouds billowing into the air.

 You stumbled over a rock and landed hard on your knees. Ryan touched your shoulder, “You okay?”

Your mouth was dry, and you felt a sudden pain in your stomach. Jack immediately came to your side, “Hey, look at me,” he said, voice calm and soothing. “You’re okay, come on.”

All those feelings you had buried deep inside yourself flooded back. You felt terrified and you couldn’t move. You forced yourself to look over your shoulder at the way you came. The skyline looked exactly the same. You could almost see the outline of one of the mushroom clouds, far away yet so bright and terrifying. 

Voices were muffled and it felt like your head was full of water. Your vision blurred and you couldn’t focus. You felt like you were suddenly drowning, clawing at the surface, but yet you couldn’t move or shout or scream. You were just still and yet all around you was moving and it was terrifying and you wanted to get out and you just couldn’t. Everything was wrong. Why were you here? Why weren’t you back in the city? The city was safe. You could hide there. No one would find you. Out here was danger. You had to go back. It was just too much. Why had you ever left?

A hand turned your head and your vision cleared slightly at the jarring motion. Blue eyes stared down at you.

Another hand reached up and touched the other side of your head.

You didn’t hear the words he said, but you felt yourself grabbing his wrists. He pulled you against his chest, and you heard his steady heartbeat and calm breathing as clear as glass. You closed your eyes from the world and focused on that. You focused on the calm, the good. You slowed your breathing to match his. In. Out. In and out. In…and out.

Soon, the water drained, and the voices cleared.

Your fingers were stilled clutching Ryan’s wrists tightly, his hands still cupping your head. It was awkward with your head smushed against his chest, but you felt safe there. You stayed against him for a few more heartbeats before you carefully detached yourself. The others fell silent as you unpeeled your fingers from his wrists. His hands stayed against your head, but they did move to brush at your cheeks.

There was a brief moment of silence before someone piped up, “I don’t think she started crying because she scraped her knees.”

You would’ve snorted at any other time. Instead, you wiped your nose with the back of your hand and fell backward onto your butt so you could check out the damage done on your knees. No one questioned you as Ryan helped put band-aids on a few cuts that were bleeding. When the last band-aid was secured, you stood up slowly and adjusted your backpack. You looked at the road ahead and then backward.

Should you just…go back to the city? Tell them that you’ve decided not to join them? This was a bad idea. You shouldn’t have come.

“What’s wrong?” Geoff asked, placing a hand on your shoulder. “I know that look.”

“What look?” you asked, attempting in vain to ignore the situation. Thrust all the bad feelings away, and ignore the past.

“Like you’ve seen a ghost,” Ryan murmured.

“I haven’t-”

Geoff said your name, very gently, but at the same time in a firm manner. You looked at him, keeping your mouth shut. “If something is wrong, you need to tell us. We can’t help you if we don’t know what’s wrong, and if something’s wrong and that something can get people killed or injured? We really need to know.”

You opened your mouth, then snapped it closed.

Just ignore the past.

“Nothing-”

Ryan said your name this time.

You closed your eyes tightly, and then just…let go. It was word vomit really. You didn’t know how much made sense. You just told them about the escape, seeing the mushroom clouds. You pointed and gestured. Explained how this area was all too familiar. If this camp was where you thought it was…you didn’t know if you could go. When you admitted that to the group, you were met with silence. You didn’t meet any of their eyes either. You couldn’t. You felt weak to admit that. You told them you were just going to go back to the city. You couldn’t do this.

Ryan grabbed your hand. “We’re not leaving you,” he said firmly. “Look. We’ll scope this place out, we won’t just blindly into it. We were going to do that anyway. These are very unlikely to be the same people who did that to you.”

The others agreed with Ryan.

“If they are?” Geoff added, “They most likely haven’t changed how they run the place. If they are, I don’t want to bring this group in there. Regardless of how much safety they could give us.”

Instead of pressing on, Geoff called for a break and to set up camp for the night. No one questioned the decision, and no one mentioned or brought up your moment of panic. You were incredibly thankful for that. The night went on as usual, rations were passed around, the sleep schedule was decided, and then everyone not on the first watch curled up near the campfire in their sleeping bags and quickly fell asleep. You could hear the snores almost instantly, Michael and Lindsay’s voices murmuring back and forth to each other. You peaked at them, Lindsay was braiding some of Michael’s hair to pull it back from his face.

Your eyes slid to the red hat resting beside your backpack and you nestled further into your sleeping bag.

There was no way you were getting to sleep anytime soon, but you laid still, peering over the edge of the sleeping bag at the hat. Lindsay and Michael eventually switched out with Trevor and Gavin. You still were awake.

Your body was screaming at you to sleep, but you just couldn’t. You were so exhausted, but there was that tiny voice in the back of your mind reminding you that you were so close to that place.

You heard the soft rustling of a sleeping bag beside you, then a sleepy murmur. It drew your attention away from the hat over to Ryan, his eyes were half closed, but he looked like he was waiting for some response. His hand slipped between the sleeping bags and found your hand resting on your stomach. “You sleep yet?” he whispered, repeating the question you had missed earlier. You shook your head and he wiggled slightly. The wiggling shifted his sleeping bag closer and he rested his arm on your stomach, his forehead resting against your shoulder. “Sleep,” came his muffled command.

You rested your hand on his arm, fingers feeling the edge of a scar. His arm twitched slightly, but he didn’t move it away.

You remembered Ryan reacting to the guns before the two of you had gotten separated. Whatever he had been feeling had been identical to what you had felt today, you didn’t even have to ask him. He had that same sort of…unsettling fear in his eyes and he hadn’t been able to move. If the two of you had been spotted, you wondered if he would’ve even processed that, or if he could’ve even fled for his life? You let your head roll towards him, and your chin brushed the top of his head.

Everyone here would’ve had some frightening experience during or after the war. They would’ve all had those moments of terror.

That was why none of them commented or tried to brush you off. They had all experienced it.

They helped you through it without even needing to be asked.

They were giving you time to deal with it before moving forward. They weren’t pushing or rushing you to confront what was ahead of you.

Your body was exhausted, but your mind was alert. You just wanted to sleep, but you couldn’t.

Ryan’s head tilted up, his head resting beside your own. He was fast asleep now, and you felt his even breathing against your neck. You had dated before the war and you remembered when your significant other would do the same thing and you would instantly feel uncomfortable and try to move away. Now? It had an odd comforting effect, and you rested your cheek against his forehead.

You didn’t fall asleep right away, but your fingers gently made patterns against his skin.

When you finally fell asleep, your sleep was riddled with nightmares that made you jerk awake. Each time Ryan would wake up and sleepily murmur comforting words to you, pulling you closer.

When you finally woke up without being startled awake by a nightmare, you heard the sounds of the camp slowly waking up. You didn’t dare move if Ryan wasn’t up yet, but you blinked slowly, debating going back asleep. Instead, you made eye contact with Meg accidentally, who waggled her eyebrows at you.

You snorted, and Ryan shifted. His arm disappeared from around your waist and he flopped onto his back, rubbing at his eyes.

“Okay! Now that sleeping beauty there is awake,” Geoff clapped his hands together. “We’re going to split up into groups of three and spread out in search of this base. If you see it, mark it down on your maps and report back here. Don’t bother trying to scope it out fully until we are all together.”

Ryan sat up and glanced over his shoulder at Geoff, “Can’t we eat before doling out plans of action?”

“Why wait?” Geoff waved a dismissive hand, “We can plan while we eat.”

No one bothered arguing that, but packed up their individual things and got to munching on their breakfast. You weren’t much help identifying exactly where the base was. You could barely remember where it was, and you thought it had been much closer to the city. You had run for so long on so much adrenaline that you didn’t really realize how far you had actually moved. To be honest, you had forced yourself to forget which direction you had even entered the city after you fled the base anyways. You had just found your small corner that you claimed to be yours and stayed where it was safe.

Michael, Gavin, and Lindsay were Group A. Geoff, Jack, and Caiti were Group B. Jeremy, Trevor, and Alfredo was Group C. Then, finally, Ryan, Meg, and you were Group D.  The plan was to continue North, but in a more easterly or westerly direction, spreading out to capture more ground. According to Jack, that had been the plan anyway if they got past a certain point on the map and they hadn’t found it. They knew it was close by according to the directions they had gotten over the radio, but they didn’t know where exactly. That was all they had been given.

Your ankle was still vaguely sore, but you didn’t slow your group down any. Your group was headed directly west from the camp.

“This would be the part when having walkie-talkie would be great,” Meg commented an hour into the walk. “That way we’d know exactly when someone else found it, instead of walking for a few hours and then heading back.”

“No batteries,” you pointed out. “Also, if someone else is out here and they have one on the same frequency they could find us.”

“What if they were people who need help?” Meg countered you could tell by her tone she just wanted to talk rather than have a true debate.

“What if they’re like those assholes who kidnapped me?” Ryan asked, and you took a quick peek to look at his injuries. He caught you looking and gave you a reassuring smile.

“What if they’re like your girlfriend?” Meg teased, causing you to blush, and eyes to snap to the forest floor.

“Well, I’d have to throw a tomahawk at their heads first,” Ryan retorted, “also, we’re not dating.”

“Aw, Rye-bread is blushing,” Meg teased again, but she stopped moving too abruptly for your liking. You looked over, an ill feeling raising in your stomach. Her head was tilted slightly, eyebrows pulled down and mouth slightly parted. She jerked her head slightly in the direction she was looking. Following her gaze, you saw something that made your stomach do a flip.

It was a concrete wall with barb wire around the top.

“That doesn’t look natural,” Meg murmured quietly, you took off your hat and handed it to Ryan. He tucked it in your backpack for you and the three of you pulled up your hoods.

“We can double back,” Ryan whispered. “There was a hiking trail back there that led further up. If we can get a glimpse beyond that wall we can tell if that’s what we’re looking for or not.”

You and Meg agreed and followed Ryan. No one spoke, afraid of being heard by the wrong people. The trail path was overgrown and barely visible. It would’ve been a gorgeous hiking trail back in its prime, but now it was incredibly hard to track through. Ryan almost fell a few times, but you and Meg grabbed him before he fell to his knees. No injuries were allowed. If it was you or Meg? That was different, but you didn’t know if you and Meg could carry Ryan back to the camp in time if anything happened to him that made him unable to walk.

At the top of the path, Ryan found a vantage point easily, and the three of you dropped to your stomachs.

You squinted but could barely see anything past the wall. It did look like there were people inside, but you couldn’t tell beyond that.

Meg wriggled her backpack off and dug through. She produced a pair of binoculars and looked through them. She sucked air sharply through her teeth and handed them over to Ryan. He looked through them for a moment before lowering them. He handed them to you almost reluctantly.

You took a deep breath before looking through them.

There were people inside. You saw familiar sights. As odd as it was, that didn’t provoke the same sort of deep-rooted terror as before. The base itself didn’t frighten you, just the memories that were attached to them, and remembering so…harshly had shaken you to your core yesterday. Now? You knew what you were going to see when you looked through the binoculars.

The people in charge had no military uniforms, they carried weapons but none of them carried themselves in a way that a soldier should. You saw a field being tended by some other people, but those were wearing rags as clothing, you couldn’t tell exactly but you saw something around the wrists and assumed they were shackles. One of the people dropped to the ground, and a ‘solider’ went rushing over and proceeded to kick the man. You lowered the binoculars.

No one spoke.

“What are we going to do?” Meg whispered, sounding so helpless.

“We need to tell the others we can’t stay,” Ryan said shuffling backward slowly on the floor. “Quickly.”

“Those people…we can’t just leave them,” Meg said looking at him. “We need to do something.”

“We try to rescue them, we’ll just end up dead or with them,” Ryan’s response wasn’t cruel or sharp, he sounded as upset about it as Meg did.

You looked through the binoculars again, “There’s a generator that supplies the grounds with power. We slip in at night, shut off the power? Those people will have their chance to escape. They take it? Good. They don’t take the chance? That’s on them.”

Both were silent, you looked at them. Meg was staring at Ryan with an expectant look on her face.

“We talk to the others about it first. I don’t like it,” Ryan said and waved for the two of you to follow him.


	16. Chapter XVI

“I don’t like this,” Ryan grumbled into your ear.

“You volunteered to come with me,” you remind him, staring out from the cover of some bushes. Your heart was pounding in your chest like a drum, and you were sure you were already covered in a thin sheen of sweat. “I said I could do it alone.”

He opened his mouth but two men came out of the bunker, closing the door and walking in the opposite direction of your hiding spots. He chose not to continue the argument the two of you had since you had explained the plan to Geoff. It had taken two days to come to an agreement. Half the group wanted to go, the other half were resolute in helping if they could. Even if none of the people escaped, at least you did what you could to help them. You didn’t want to look badly on the half that wanted to go, they didn’t want to leave the people but they were also looking out for their own safety. You understood, which was when you had volunteered to go alone. One person was harder to detect than multiple. Ryan had been resolute that you would not go alone, and the two of you had nearly started yelling at each other about it until Jack and Geoff split the two of you up to talk to you separately. To see the others side of things.

Now, he was stuck with you and you wouldn’t admit it out loud but you were glad that he was there with you and you weren’t alone.

“We should just leave,” Ryan muttered as you pressed forwards.

The group didn’t really have a routine or patrols. The two men were at the far end of the compound sharing a cigarette around a burning barrel with some others. You slipped up to the bunker and tested the door, it creaked when you opened it but Ryan didn’t mention anyone noticed the two of you entering. You took that as a good sign. They weren’t expecting people to be sneaking about.

Still, you were cautious every time you needed to pass a hallway.

If you remembered correctly, the generator room was near the back of the bunker. Just in case a malfunction happened, people would be able to escape through the front. Which, unfortunately, meant that you and Ryan had to cross the entire bunker and hope no one noticed you.

Zombies were terrifying, but you were even more terrified of this.

“Let’s just break into a military bunker, flip the generator switch, and escape before they notice us,” Ryan muttered under his breath. “What could go wrong?”

You place a hand on his chest and back him up into a room. Both of you stayed quiet as you heard people pass. When their footsteps went silent you exhaled. “We’re going to be fine, just trust in that please?” you asked, looking up at him. He took a deep breath.

“I’ll trust you,” he whispered. “Can’t trust this plan.”

You took it. The two of you headed back on your way.

It was actually shockingly easy to get to the generator; the door to it wasn’t even locked. It was noisy as well, which made you nervous. Sure, you couldn’t hear anything now, so no one could hear the two of you moving around inside. However, once it went off? It’d be dead silent, and you were worried someone would instantly know where you were.

Ryan patted your shoulder and gestured to an emergency exit plan on the back of the door. He dragged his finger along the faded path. “We’ll go this way, it’s faster than going back to the front, and we’re less likely to go through a bunch of angry assholes.”

The path looked like it leads out east but would take the two of you underground. If the exit wasn’t accessible? There was only one way out, and that was back the other way, and you didn’t know if others knew about that exit.

Still, if it meant less chance of bumping into someone with a gun? You nodded.

It was remarkably easy to turn off the generator, probably so if anything happened to the people who knew how to, people could still do it for their safety. You were so thankful to whoever decided it in mind for the apocalypse. Ryan and you both had to pull switches and push a button in near unison. The moment the buttons were pushed, you heard the generator clunking and winding down. It wasn’t that instant power off that you thought it would be. The gears had to stop going, after all. Still, once the buttons were pushed, the two of you hurried from the room.

The lights flickered and then went off completely. You heard loud clunks as the electronically locked doors unlocked, and then a soft whirring as the backup generator kicked on. Emergency lights flicked on, guiding people towards the nearest exit. Another thing you were so thankful for, the bunker being built before the end of the world so they still gave a shit about the safety of even the prisoners. Legally they had to before the military took control of the government.

Distant sounds of fighting echoed through the corridors and screams.

Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to bust them out this way.

You ignored it.

As you hurried down a corridor, one of the doors that had popped open in the emergency caught your eye and you stopped. It was the military armoury. Ryan saw it a second after you, and when you took a step towards it he caught your arm. “What are you doing?”

“Come!” you hissed pulling him towards it. There was no one inside. “Find grenades!”

“What the fuck are you doing?” he snapped, “We need to go!”

“Grenades, Ryan!” you repeat, pushing him towards the other end of the room. He near growled in frustration but listened to you. It didn’t take long to find a few boxes of grenades which you stacked in the center of the room. The two of you left the room, but Ryan tossed a grenade back into the room, it’s pin pulled. You didn’t even look at him before you were running down the hallway with him following. He had another one in his hand, pin still in place.

You didn’t question why he kept one, probably as a last resort sort of thing.

Ryan had clearly studied the path the two of you needed to take, taking over leading the two of you. Thankfully, this time you two were running for your lives without either of your packs. You couldn’t exact lug that much weight around. Besides, if you were caught you didn’t want to give these assholes any more supplies.

He skidded to a halt and you slammed into his back. He barely stumbled, but instead, he opened a door. Inside was a bunch of equipment that you instantly recognized as a communications room. It had more modern technology, but it had a wide variety of other communicating devices. He pulled the pin and tossed the grenade towards the machine. It landed on the desk and rolled behind a monitor. He grabbed your arm and the two of you took off again. The explosion behind you sent a thrill through your body.

It quickly faded as you realized the grave situation was that you two were still running for your lives.

Down another hallway, a right, then a left.

“There!” Ryan called over his shoulder.

He slammed open the door with his shoulder.

An arm shot out in front of you, catching your throat. Your head snapped back and you felt your body slam against the floor. The sole of a boot was the last thing you saw.


	17. Chapter XVII

Your face hurt…really, really bad. Opening your eyes hurt, and when your face scrunched in response to a bright light, your nose felt like it was on fire.

You were staring up at a familiar ceiling. The bed beneath you was equally as familiar. For a moment, you thought you had never left the compound. The end of the war a product of your subconscious wishes, and equally so was the people you had met afterward. Ryan…

When you sat up, you were almost relieved to see Ryan sitting across the small cell with his head in his hands. He looked up as you swung your legs off the bed, and he let out a sigh, and reached over and placed his hand on your knee. “I’m sorry…”

“Why are you sorry?” you asked, your voice thick and croaky. You had been clotheslined, that hurt like a motherfucker. You rubbed your throat.

“I…took us on a longer route to the exit because I saw the communication room. I didn’t want them to be able to tell others what happened if there are others. I didn’t want them broadcasting to unexpecting others again,” he muttered. “Now here we are.”

“Those assholes could’ve been waiting there for anyone to try that exit,” you placed your hand over his and squeezed. “Let’s just-”

The door opened and Ryan jumped to his feet. Two guns were trained on him as two men entered the room. They didn’t say anything but stepped aside to let a third man enter the room. He didn’t seem any different to the others, but to be escorted usually meant importance.

“You two are new,” the man said, scrutinizing you and Ryan closely. He reached forward and grabbed Ryan’s face roughly, you saw Ryan’s arms twitched upwards, but the guns shifted and he stilled. The man roughly removed his hand, “Fresh meat? How kind of you to offer yourselves in the place of those who, I’m assuming, you let loose? Let me just tell you some numbers here…we had fifty. Your stunt got twelve killed, and twenty escaped. Thirty-two assets are gone. We’re left with eighteen. Well…twenty now that you two are here. We had twenty men, five were killed, and another six left with the others. Now, I only have nine men. However, with the generator back on and many of the assets incapacitated, we can make due. It’ll take a while to regain numbers of the assets however since you destroyed the communication center. Thank you for that.”

Neither Ryan nor you responded, mostly just too afraid to do anything wrong with the guns pointed at Ryan.

The man sighed and crossed his arms, “You can speak. We won’t murder you just for talking.”

“Assets?” you asked, ignoring how much your voice wavered. His eyes brightened.

“Glad you asked!” he said enthusiastically, “I’m a scientist, and I’ve been attempting to cure the zombies! That’s not being facetious, by the way. I know how that sounds. The sad fact is that you hindered my research into curing the human population of this disease. This used to be a prison, but after the war, the military opened it up to protect those who needed an escape from the zombies. Fast forward, the military fucked off militia took over, and I supported the change a hundred percent. Besides, some of these jerks are sick, but that’s the only kind of people who can help me capture and study zombies.”

You didn’t want to risk looking at Ryan, but you were even more afraid of this man now. Studying zombies? Militia? He seemed like the war had twisted his mind and he wasn’t thinking straight anymore. So far, if his words had been different, you would’ve just assumed he was an overly positive person. Now? You were wondering if his high would crash, and you didn’t want to see the other end of the pendulum.

“Of course, there’s not much to do about the already deceased. The decomposition, not to mention brain deterioration, is too far along. Nothing we can do for the poor souls besides destroy them. The humans, like myself and you, with a cure we’ll be able to survive even entering the most toxic regions! We might be able to enter Los Angeles or New York again!”

Noble intentions…with less than noble means.

You didn’t like that.

You didn’t say anything.

The man seemed displeased at your reactions.

“You could at least apologize for destroying parts of my compound?” he looked between the two of you. Nothing.

A man peered in through the door, “Sir, there are people fighting topside.”

The man growled and twisted on his heel and stormed out the door. “Well deal with them! Must I do everything! Come!”

The two guards left and shut the door behind them. You heard the electronic click and whir as the door locked.

Ryan instantly deflated and shakily sat down on the bed beside you. You leaned against him, placing a hand on his back. He leaned back, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. “This is….we’re fucked. This man is insane. We’ve destroyed their armoury but they still have weapons they can still kill us faster than we can decide to harm them. The others won’t dare risk trying to get to us, if the compound is already gone to shit they’ll wait around for a few days but assume we’re dead. Who knows what he’s going to do either. If he’s testing out cures for zombies? We might accidentally get infected. I-”

You swiftly slipped off the bed to kneel in front of him. “Hey,” you spoke clearly, “Don’t worry. We have to keep a clear head. He’s told us exactly how many people he has. Only nine.”

“That's seven more than we have,” he responded. “We’re not even fighters. We don’t have weapons.”

You reached up and cupped the side of his face. “We’ve got each other.”

He leant down suddenly and mashed his lips to you. It was for a second and he pulled away quickly. You didn’t know how to react at first, your face heated and you were sure you were bright red. You saw the apology ready on his lips as you stood up, but you grabbed the collar of his shirt and bent down and crushed your lips to his. For just a second, nothing was wrong. It was just you and him.

This pure man.

You released his collar, one hand sliding up to rest at the back of his head, the other resting where it lay. His hands wrapped around your waist and he clung to you like if he let go that would be it.

This sweet, kind, gentleman.

It was him who pulled away first, reluctantly, but he did.

His eyes searched yours and suddenly he looked very unsure of himself. “Did…you-”

“I’m not kissing you because I’m afraid I’m going to die not smooching a cute guy,” you teased, but then quickly sobered. “I mean…in the situation we probably shouldn’t be doing this at all, but I mean it’s not like we’re going anywhere fast.”

The door opened as if you had summoned someone with your words. Two new men entered guns at the ready. “Come with us,” one of them demanded, jerking the gun back towards the door. You had stepped away from Ryan the moment the door opened, and you moved to leave first. Ryan grabbed your arm and slipped past, neither of you said anything, but his hand didn’t leave your arm but instead slipped down to encircle your hand. You squeezed his hand and followed him out the door.

The two men led you outside the bunker, surprisingly. You saw some people digging a hole in the ground, a pile of bodies loosely covered with some sheets, off to the side. None of them looked your way as they dug. You wondered if the fighting had stopped or if topside meant somewhere other than here. There were a few buildings on the surface and they led you to one of the bigger buildings.

Your blood curdled.

The familiar sound of strained breathing and pained moans filled your ears.

Zombies.


	18. Chapter XVIII

“For my personal enjoyment,” the man’s voice called down to you and Ryan, “I’m going to watch the two of you be devoured by zombies. Of course, for research purposes as well.”

You felt a pair of handcuffs clamp around your wrist before you and Ryan were shoved forwards. A heavy clang of metal being dropped sounded behind the two of you. A large iron gate thudded down, locking you and Ryan in a sort of makeshift ring that reminded you all too much of the Colosseum. Complete with cage doors holding zombies who pressed against them at the sight of fresh meat so close to them.

“I thought we were assets?” Ryan called out, you heard the nervousness in his voice, and his gaze was on the cages. You risked a glance up and saw the man on a metal balcony above. He was leaning on the railing, watching with a sort of excitement that made you want to vomit.

“You are! This will let me figure out how to best provide my remaining men with the knowledge of how to avoid zombies. Of course, this is a trial run so I don’t know how effective it will be.”

“If we’re your men shouldn’t we have weapons?” Ryan asked, hopeful that he could attempt to make the man see the logic in that and throw some weapons to the two of you. You hoped the man would be stupid enough to be manipulated like that. Unfortunately, the man just lets out a sharp barking laugh.

“No, the guns are for people! I suppose you can have a knife, that will just lengthen this scenario!” the evil villain stereotype turned to one of his men, who pulled a large knife from his boot and handed it over. The knife was dropped down close to a cage with a laughing ‘oops!’ from the asshole. Ryan hurried to it, and you were dragged along with him. You hadn’t bothered to notice what they had strapped to you until now. They had tied you and Ryan together. That was fucked up. Ryan grabbed the knife just as the man ordered for the zombies to be released. The two of you darted backward as the doors to the cages started to creak open.

A door burst open and you heard a burst of gunfire. Ryan grabbed you and the two of you backed up even faster.

The man’s head snapped towards the noise.

You wanted to know what was going on, but you were more focused on the immediate threat. There were at least ten zombies, and the two of you had one knife. Which might’ve been handy, if you weren’t attached to each other, and if they clearly hadn’t been starved. Ryan held the knife tightly. You wanted to climb up the walls. You wanted to scream and beg for someone to help you. None of that would help, and Ryan was the one holding the knife. Distracting him would cost him his life.

The zombies shuffled closer.

You heard swearing and shouting and your head snapped up to see Michael and Gavin wrestling two of the men for their guns. Geoff had a gun aimed at the man, and you saw Jeremy jump down from the balcony and onto the cage. The loud rattle attracted the attention of the zombies. The small man shouted and clanged the metal more. Your eyes widened at the sight of them and you grabbed Ryan’s arm. They had come for you guys.

Michael shoved one of the men over the balcony and he fell hard on the ground. The zombies’ attention snapped to the downed man, shambling towards him instead. The fall had stunned the man enough that he didn’t move until it was too late. You ripped your gaze from them, just as Ryan plunged the knife into a zombie’s skull and took the creature down. Jeremy jumped down from the cage, rolling when he landed, and then rushed over to you two.

“Here!” he said, grabbing the handcuffs and shoving a small key into the lock.

“How did you-?” you started but he shook his head.

“Get to the cages! Climb them quick before the zombies are done with that guy!” he ordered, and you didn’t need another suggestion. Your feet thundered as you burst towards the cage. You shoved a zombie off balance and launched yourself up the cage. It was so familiar to your first meeting with Ryan, as he hoisted you upwards and then climbed up after you. You reached down and grabbed Jeremy’s jacket and together with Ryan, hauled him up after you. His ankle just being missed by a zombie.

“Gavin!” you heard Geoff yell, and your gaze snapped up to the balcony.

You didn’t know what had happened, but the man had a gun pressed to Gavin’s neck, and had him bent backward over the railing. Gavin was screaming, and both Michael and Geoff had guns trained on the man. He didn’t seem to care however, you saw the pure rage on his face, blotchy and red. Gavin managed to wrestle the gun away just enough that Michael felt safe enough to shoot the man. You clamped your eyes closed, but heard a body thud against the ground within a second of doing so. Ryan was pushing you to move before you could open them to see who had fallen.

It was the man.

He wasn’t getting up, even if the zombies didn’t get to him.

Michael and Geoff hoisted the three of you off the cage and up to the balcony before checking on Gavin who was on his ass with wide eyes and a white face. You hurried over to him as well.

You didn’t even get a chance to ask if he was okay before Geoff was hoisting him to his feet. “We need to get out of here.”

No one argued. You nearly slipped down the stairs hurrying down to the ground, but Michael pushed you back to your feet. Geoff threw open the door they had entered and waved everyone through. You saw the rest of the group waiting impatiently at the entrance to the compound. However, you skidded to a stop. The pile of bodies was…writhing.

They had been dead.

Ryan nudged you, but you couldn’t move. He was silent, and you saw his head turned to look at the pile in your peripherals. The others were silent, watching.

“Someone must’ve survived!” Gavin squawked and started for the pile, Michael grabbed his shirt and hauled him backward nearly pulling him off his feet. You felt dread in your stomach.

“We need to get the fuck out of here,” you grabbed Ryan’s sleeve and started walking back towards the others. “Whatever he did to the people here…I really, really don’t want to figure out.”

Gavin and Michael hesitated for a moment before hurrying after you. Geoff watched the bodies until a female reached out, her fingernails digging into the dirt and she dragged herself out from the pile. If it wasn’t for her slightly glazed over eyes and her chest absolutely riddled with bullet holes, you would’ve thought maybe she had survived. Geoff lifted the gun up and shot the woman in the head. She slumped to the ground, and the rest of the bodies started to shift. The sounds of groans and moans reaching your ears.

Dead people didn’t become zombies.

You had seen too many dead bodies decomposed. You knew they didn’t come back.

Without a word exchanged, the six of you hurried back to the rest of the group. Lindsay reached over and squeezed your shoulder, but otherwise, everyone remained silent. They were too busy apprehensively looking at the pile as the zombies slowly began to crawl towards the now dead zombie. You wondered if the man had thought he had found a cure for humanity, but instead had accidentally just infected those people. Did he even have any knowledge about creating a vaccine? Was it even a vaccine that could stop people from becoming infected? You didn’t know, and honestly? That wasn’t something you could justify worrying about.

Trevor and Jeremy closed the compound door from the inside, before hopping over the fence. Trevor managed to scratch up his calf, but he said he was fine and the group hurried back towards their camp. You didn’t think anyone would be even remotely comfortable with staying near the compound, but at the same time? Where would they go? Where would you go? Going back to the city was…an idea, but you didn’t want to go back.

The camp was just like the two of you had left it, and you dropped heavily down beside your pack. The red hat was still resting on top and you immediately tugged it on backward. Ryan sat down beside you, digging through his pack and procuring two protein bars. You accepted one and bit greedily into it. You hadn’t eaten anything since before entering the compound. You didn’t know how long you and Ryan had been in the cell for. A few hours? A day? You had been unconscious after all.

“I’m sorry,” Geoff spoke up after you had finished your bar. He dragged his hands through his hair. “I promised y’all a safe place…and we could’ve just been slaves or turned into zombies.”

“That’s not your fault,” Jack said, clapping his friend on the shoulder. “You can’t take the blame for those assholes.”

“Still! We came all the way out here for nothing. Now we’re running out of supplies, we’re tired, injured, and for what?” he threw his hands in the air. “Nothing.”

“Not nothing,” Ryan said, “We’ve stopped them from being able to send out radio signals telling others. We’ve stopped them from continuing their fucked up experiments. That’s not nothing. It’s not what we came out here to do, but we’ve done it, and it wasn’t nothing.”

“What were the explosions about?” Trevor asked, “I thought this was supposed to be a sneaky mission?”

“We set off some grenades in their armoury and their communications room,” Ryan said handing out a water bottle after he drank half, you accepted it and felt your parched mouth soothed by the cool water. You’d kill for some ice cubes and hell some lemons or something to add a hint of flavour to the water.

“Why? We could’ve used their weapons,” Michael shook his head. “They’re all dead, what use do they have for them?”

“Every time I see someone with guns, they’re pointing them at another human being,” you pointed out. “They’re not used against the zombies, they’re used against humans. I don’t want people to think they have that much power that they could just take another humans life.”

Michael fell silent, and Gavin nodded in agreement. “Plus! Zombies are attracted to noise, firing guns would just bring more of them. If we could find a sword collection, that would be top.”

That seemed to perk Michael up.

“If we pass by a museum we could break in and steal some,” Jeremy suggested. “We’d just have to figure out how to sharpen blades because I don’t think they’re sharp in museums, are they?”

The three boys started debating whether they would be or not. Lindsay just shook her head with a grin before looking over at Geoff. He was still in inner turmoil about not being able to find a safe place for the group. You didn’t know what to tell him. The cynic in you wanted to say that nowhere was safe and he couldn’t ever promise that or fulfill it. However, you couldn’t bring yourself to actually say it.

Lindsay cleared her throat and then looked around at the group. “Instead of finding a military base or something, why don’t we just find a farm? One that’s close enough to the city that we could do trips out to get extra supplies, but far enough away that we won’t be as at risk of being found by zombies?”

The simple suggestion sparked a full-blown debate amongst the group. Everyone was in favour of it, after all, it was a plan. However, should it be a farm or a smaller town? Or should they see if they could find some lakeside cabins for the benefit of fishing? As the camp was dismantled and the group moved away from the compound, the conversation dwindled to individual groups talking about what they’d like to have wherever they decided to settle. You listened to Michael and Jeremy talk about wanting to see if they could figure out how to get a punching bag out of the city.

Later that night, the group finally just dropped their stuff down where they were standing. You were sure the group had been walking nearly eight hours, which was plenty of distance away from the compound. The fire was started, food eaten, and you were gingerly touching your face. It was broken, you knew what your nose should feel like and it wasn’t that. It was crooked, and you didn’t know how to reset a nose properly. Besides? Eight hours of healing, you didn’t know if you could safely reset it anymore.

You were so consumed by your facial injury, you didn’t notice Ryan setting up his sleeping bag beside you and then sitting crossed legged so his shins touched your thigh. You glanced over at the contact, eyebrow raised. He reached over, turning your face more towards the firelight to examine your injury. He sighed, his thumb brushing just beside your nose. “Your eye is slightly bruised, I think your nose might be broken. You might want to wash your face, you’ve got dried blood on your lip,” he pointed out by brushing his thumb against the corner of your mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” you asked, digging through your bag for a cloth and some extra water. Geoff was right, the supplies were draining and they were draining fast. You would be able to make it back to the city if you rationed a bit better. You were more consumed by your supplies you almost missed what Ryan was saying, but you caught it and immediately stopped to look at him. He was apologizing for you getting clotheslined. “That wasn’t your fault.”

“I saw the men just before I slammed the door open…I should’ve said something faster but I couldn’t you were too close behind me. You could’ve been killed because we stopped-”

You touched his cheek, “Hey, you already tried apologizing and I already told you…don’t. It wasn’t your fault…and look,” you jerked your chin towards the fire, “We got out. It’s fine.”

“No, I didn’t think-”

You leaned forwards and gave him a quick peck on the lips. “We’re fine. Ryan.”

He sighed deeply, “We’re fine.”

You smiled and he gave you a small kiss back, and then another one on your forehead. “Thank god for that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woot! One more chapter and this story is all wrapped up! Thank you to everyone who supported me thus far and I'll see you guys next week for the final chapter! <3


	19. Chapter XIX: Epilogue

“So, now you just…” Ryan grunted, before stepping back and wiping his forehead with his forearm. His hands and arms were covered with blood, and he held a knife in one hand. He gestured towards the deer carcass and you took the knife from him. It had been nearly two years since you had met him. Over a year and a half since the compound, and just over a year since Trevor and Alfredo had found the Lake House. It was a day’s trip from the city but had probably been a bed & breakfast at one point. There were enough rooms in the damn place for everyone to have one to themselves if they wished.

The plus side? The lake. You always had the option of bathing that way, and it was stocked full of fish. Geoff and Jack had taken up fishing, and in a few weeks, it would be the second annual fishing jamboree! You were excited, fresh fish was great. Especially after eating nothing but canned food for so long. Of course, this was the first deer caught in the new year, winter had been rough.

You glance up, seeing Michael and Gavin fixing a hole in the dock they had caused during a rambunctious day last fall. Michael gave Gavin a small shove, and you had to stop what you were doing to watch as that tiny shove turn into a full-on fight with Gavin screaming and running down the dock chased by Michael. Micheal jumped and took Gavin down on the bank and proceeded to try to carry the skinny lad towards the water's edge.

Meg laughed, drawing your attention away from the shenanigans by the water. She and Geoff were preparing a barrel for salting some of the meat, the two were looking at the waters edge with amusement.

Everyone had simple just assigned themselves tasks when getting to the Lake House. Jeremy and Ryan had instantly been all about hunting once they found a hunting rifle and gear in the shed out back. Thank god for that, fresh meat that first time had been absolute heaven. Michael and Geoff had taken it upon themselves to fix up the place and set up routines and chores for everyone. Geoff had taken it upon himself to be the chef for the group, and since the house had plenty of storage? That meant plenty more options for food. Gavin and Meg found ways to, surprisingly, set up solar panels, well they were still in the process of it. Ryan was a big help in that department as well. Caiti and Jack had started a garden and had somehow on a trip out, found some chickens. You had been so shocked when they had brought the chickens, and the others had been as well. You didn’t think farm animals would’ve survived. Trevor and Alfredo had tasked themselves with decking out the place with entertainment and relaxing aspects, they did help out a lot with other projects as well, but you were so thankful that they had thought of relaxation. The hammock in the summer nights was your all-time favourite place to cuddle up with Ryan.

You? You had become the defacto doctor. With your medication knowledge, you had gone to the library during a trip into the city shortly after coming to this place and you brought as many medical books back with you as you could, as well as herbology books. You knew eventually the strong medication would run out, so eventually, you’d need an alternative. You knew how to set bones, how to stitch someone up, the whole nine yards…as basic medical knowledge went. If someone got seriously sick, you didn’t know if you could nurse them back to health, but you ignored that idea immediately.

“You’ve got blood on your cheek,” Ryan pointed out halfway through butchering the deer. You simply stuck your tongue out at him, bumping your hip against his. He dropped a kiss on your head and you smiled up at him.

Jeremy bounded over to the two of you, “The skin off yet?”

Ryan nodded and handed it over to Jeremy. He had figured out how to tan the hide, which would be turned into a plethora of different things, from jacket linings to blankets, to makeshift curtains if a window broke (which unfortunately had happened before the group had moved in.)

It took a while longer to finish the deer up, getting what was going to be saved in the barrel, and then leaving what Geoff wanted to cook with him. Covered in blood, Ryan was handed a towel promptly by Michael who ordered the both of you to go and wash up in the lake before daring to enter the house. You waved a hand but accepted a towel as well and headed after Ryan. You heard him call after the two of you to hurry back he wanted to tell everyone something.

The bathing spot wasn’t actually in the lake proper, but a quick walk away where a small river ran from the lake. Ryan stripped off his bloody shirt and immediately submerged it into the water and began scrubbing at the blood. You joined him. Shirts were a dime a dozen in the city, but the next trip wasn’t planned until after the fishing jamboree and you were running out of shirts. Winter hadn’t been kind.

Ryan glanced over at you, shirtless and then held out his hand. You handed him your shirt and he waded back to the shore to hang the shirts up to dry. You dunked your head under the icy water and scrubbed harshly at your face to remove the last of the water. You flicked your head up quickly, noticing Ryan right behind you. Your hair smacked him right in the face, just as planned. He sputtered and then grabbed your waist. You laughed as he fake bit you on the shoulder. “Oh no! I’m being attacked by a zombie, help me!”

He nibbled at the skin there, “I think you’re too sweet for a zombie to want to eat.”

“Aw, so kind!” you giggled, leaning back against him.

His nibbles moved up your neck and then his hands started moving to dangerous territory. You sighed, and then slid your fingers between his and stopped him. “As much as I’d love to, Michael wanted to make an announcement. If we’re not back soon, he’s going to storm down here.” Ryan sighed against your neck and reluctantly released you. You turned around and gave him a kiss, “Later,” you promised.

The two you of left the river, drying yourselves along the way and only bothering putting your shirts on just before you left the cover of the forest. It was a fairly warm spring day, otherwise, you’d have put your shirt on right away.

Ryan entered the house before you and you saw Geoff prepping dinner in the kitchen through the door, but everyone else was gathered in the living room by the fireplace. Lindsay spotted you and then nudged her husband. Michael called for Geoff, who hurried in, wiping his hands on a towel.

“What’s the announcement? I want to get the meat cooking soon so we can eat before the sun sets,” Geoff said, looking both impatient and curious.

Michael looked over at Lindsay, you saw the mix of apprehension and happiness and excitement in their gaze. Most importantly, absolute love. You knew what they were going to say before they said it.

“We’re having a baby,” Michael announced, “I know it’s not ideal…but we’ve been using protection, including what you,” Michael gestured to you, “suggested.”

Congratulations were abundant. You hugged Lindsay tightly, promising her you’d got to the city as soon as possible to get as many books as you could on pregnancy and home births. Everyone was offering their support and love. Michael announced that Geoff was going to be the baby’s godfather, and Geoff started bawling and hugging the two of them.

You were still reeling from the news later that night, braiding your hair by the window. Your thoughts left the pregnancy and shifted to wondering whether or not you wanted to cut your hair. Ryan had cut his the other day, it had been past his shoulders before he got fed up with the length and hacked it off with some dull scissors. Meg fixed it for him, saying that she wasn’t a hairdresser but she cut wigs so she could probably do it?

Ryan stepped up behind you, his hands running up and down your arms before coming around your waist to pull you against him. Neither of you were dressed, and you simply relaxed against his chest, as he languidly kissed your cheek, neck,  and shoulder. You gently stroked his arm, staring out at the lake. You just felt…content. You could ignore that there were zombies, fucked up people, you could ignore that there had been a war. Even though if you turned around you would see the results of the war splattered on Ryan’s chest. The angry scars of an angry time.

“Marry me?” Ryan murmured into your neck. You froze.

“What?”

He didn’t say anything at first but stepped back. You turned around slowly, looking up at him in shock. “Will you marry me?”

“I-It’s the apocalypse! How c-can we get married?” you stuttered out. He wanted to marry you?

“More reason to get married. One of us could die at any time. I’d rather die your husband,” Ryan said, “But!” he headed over to his backpack that he had abandoned by the bedroom door the last time he had gone out to the city. He dug into the bag and then pulled out a box. “I robbed a jewellery store, Meg had gotten your ring size,” he got down on one knee and opened the box.

You stared at him. He was completely naked and proposing to you.

You started laughing, and then tears just burst out and you threw yourself into his arms. Clinging to him tightly. “Yes, I will!”

He nearly fell over, and you crushed your lips to his.

Something fell against the door and you heard Gavin’s squawk. Ryan sighed, getting up and pulling on a pair of pants. You grabbed one of his shirts and yanked on a pair of shorts before he opened the door. A few of the others were crowding by the door, attempting to get Gavin to his feet. They all froze once the door opened, staring at the two of you in shock. Geoff dropped Gavin flat on his ass.

“It was Trevor’s idea!” he claimed before disappearing into his room. The others fled before they could get in trouble, yelling congrats over their shoulders. Ryan shut the door with a sigh.

“Haven’t they heard of privacy?” he muttered, but the smile on his face told you he wasn’t truly angry with the situation.

“At least we’re in the position where we have _some_ privacy,” you said, smiling at him. “If you asked me two years ago if I thought I’d be here, sharing a bedroom with you, or anyone in the middle of all this shit, wearing your shirt? I’d have laughed or cried. If you had asked me two years ago that I’d meet the love of my life after he threw a tomahawk at my head? I’d have looked at you like you were insane,” you walked over and slid your hands up his chest and then up to his shoulders.

“I love you too,” he murmured, “but honestly? You look better without my shirt,” he teased, walking forwards making you step backward towards the bed.

“I love you so much,” you said, “I’m so happy I bumped into you that day.”

“Me too,” he whispered, “you’ve changed my whole world.”

_Fin._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU ALL SOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH FOR READING THIS FAR! Thanks to everyone who supported the story, leaving comments, giving kudos, all that fun stuff.
> 
> Huge shout out to my beta-reader CaptainChilly for pre-reading every chapter and correct my many awful grammar mistakes and just plain stupid sentences that made no sense.
> 
> That's it for this story! The end~! I hope you will check out my other fanfics and I hope you enjoy them just as much as you enjoyed this story!
> 
> <3


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